Opal Perry

I'm Opal Perry. I'm the Divisional CIO of Claims for Allstate, and today I want to share with you a little bit more about myself and Allstate, particularly our technology organization, and also share how we've really learned that a focus on team values is essential for driving the transformation that lets us deliver ever more customer value.

I guess I was pretty geeky as a little kid, but I never imagined how much fun I would have geeking out on enterprise technology transformation. When I was asked in third grade what I wanted to do for a career, I said, "Inventor." I was really inspired by Edison and all the great things he had created. And by fourth grade, I wanted to be a ship's captain because I was inspired by the great tales of centuries before, of people sailing to unknown lands and exploring, finding new things, and bringing them back for others.

Well, probably like most of you, as you grow up and you learn different terms and your path takes a more natural shape, you go in a different direction. And so I studied computer engineering and went into the Air Force on active duty. They're different, but I guess they're not all that different. It's always touched back to me about building and exploration.

I love to build things. More specifically, I guess I actually really love to tear things apart and rebuild them and look to make them better when they're built back up again, and that's been a great fit for me throughout my career. I've had a lot of great opportunities. As I said, I was in the Air Force. I was in for six years active duty, and that actually was my first DevOps experience, although it wasn't called DevOps back then.

But when I really think about it, a lot of the core things that are driving the DevOps movement were behind how the Air Force chose to shape my time with them. I graduated as a computer engineer thinking, "I'm going to go right out and build the next system," and they said, "Not so fast." They said, "We've learned a lot in the past few years about really expensive and costly things that happen when great engineers who are really well-intentioned sit in their ivory tower and build something that works great in a lab, but maybe not so well in the decades out in the field."

So I went out as an aircraft maintenance officer on KC-135R refueling tankers. It was a great job, and as part of it, I got to spend 60 days in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the end of the first Gulf War.

I'll tell you, when you're in 125- to 140-degree heat every day, looking at how an aircraft built in the 1960s performs and the struggles it has and what it takes supply chain to get something halfway around the world, you learn a lot as an engineer about not just building an elegant solution that does what someone wants it to do to delight the customer on first use, but about something that really can sustain, be highly available, survivable, go the distance. That's really informed a lot of my career.

I went on to another Air Force assignment as a developmental engineer in satellite and missile systems. And then when I left the Air Force, I've been in a number of different roles, from startups to mid-size to large enterprises. But for me, it's always about leading change and fusing my love for technology with my love for teams and leading teams. It's been a really exciting journey for me.

This is a picture of some of my team here at Allstate, and I really love the picture because it reminds me that when I was recruited to come into Allstate, a big part of it was to have an opportunity, as our head of technology said, to have a seat at the table. He had this great vision, and it came from our CEO's vision of helping Allstate really create technology-driven strategy for the 22nd century.

And this seat at the table was about not just having one specific job, but really working with a team of people across functions to create great and lasting change. Let me tell you a little bit more about Allstate as a company, and then I'll come back and tell you about the change that we're driving.

Allstate, fantastic place. Next week on the 15th, I'll celebrate my five-year anniversary with the company. We're the number one publicly held property and casualty insurance company in the U.S. If you live and work in the U.S. or parts of Canada, you probably know our brand. There's a lot of insurance advertising you see on TV, and we've been known as the "Good Hands" people. It's good to be in good hands.

From really the beginnings in 1931, and I always think our origin is a really interesting thing, how we got into this business of selling insurance, and particularly auto insurance. In 1931, the automobile was really becoming mainstream. More units sold. It had been building up over the past years. All that history that we know, it's a fact of life for all of us today, the automobile.

But back then, it took a group of entrepreneurial-minded folks, many of whom worked for Sears, getting together on their commute and starting to say, "You know, this automobile thing is really taking hold. A lot of us are owning them. Let's look at getting in the insurance business." So we were born in a previous era of disruption, when automobile was disrupting traditional transport.

Now we just dream all these scenarios of the day of what's coming with autonomous cars and great changes in mobility, and that'll disrupt how we stand today. But we've got that core DNA, and we've grown over time to serve 16 million households.

That's a really important fact because what it means is we know things are changing, and we're going towards the future, but we've got a really important core base to sustain, protect, help them restore when something goes wrong today, whether they have a minor fender bender or they're one of thousands and thousands that are affected by a massive event like a hurricane.

So we're also great out in the community, and that's part of what really appealed to me joining Allstate. It's all around a great place to work, but again, with a vision of driving towards the future. And that vision, again, was informed by the understanding of how much the insurance industry is changing.

As Gene said, it has been a very risk-averse industry, for very good reason. I think it's a lot like this tanker out here. And you could draw a tanker or one of those old sailing ships I used to dream of, or an aircraft carrier, but we're a large enterprise, very purpose-built for a specific era, to control risk, to let us manage headwinds and changing tides, to get very important cargo from one place to another, and to do that, creating a lot of value for our customers and our shareholders.

Wonderful success over many years, but we all know climate's changing, right? You look out on the horizon, there's a convergence of many different forces. Among them, globalization, changing consumer preferences, mobility, of course, the cloud and all it enables in terms of what we can deliver from technology.

All these changes, and more importantly, I think the forces that interplay when the changes combine, have really changed a lot in the industry. We saw that over the last 10 years, and in fact, in 2011, right before I joined, Allstate had purchased Esurance as another brand to operate under the Allstate brand to sell direct insurance. We operate on mainly an agency model.

So great awareness that change was coming, and I love change, so what a perfect fit for me, an opportunity to come and to lead this change. And it's been great. I came into Allstate initially with the mandate to set up a global test center of excellence. A big part of that was Allstate had outsourced much of the technology talent over the past decades, and a big part of our strategy is bringing it back in-house.

I think we've all seen more and more of that recently, talk about that. If we're going to build great things, let's get it in. And so I had the great chance to set up this test center of excellence, hire many new people in India, work as Allstate-badged employees to complement Northern Ireland and the U.S. workforce.

And when you come into testing, I think all of us that have been in the industry and have seen standard development, what's the biggest question that we always get when something goes wrong in production? "Why didn't we find that in testing?" Right?

And I've been in a variety of different roles. I've gone from dev to ops to dev and back again. I came from infrastructure before I led test. And over the years, I've really understood that's the wrong question to ask. There are many whys we can ask about how did we get to a particular situation, and certainly always having better testing is one of them.

But as I got in to create this global testing organization and we really looked at things and really, again, adhered to that principle, to me, it's all about creating flow and removing waste. We knew we had a couple of big opportunities we took advantage of. One was around environments and how we managed those environments. The environment downtime we'd incurred alone amassed to many man-hours of time that great testers just couldn't even perform the tests before we had to get something into production. Right?

Great opportunity there, coupled with an opportunity to automate. We weren't highly automated, not because people didn't know automation was good, but because they hadn't figured out how, while on this moving train of constantly needing to test the current thing, could we automate.

So we had a great team, global team, put a lot of initiatives in place, started to move the bar on testing, and my successor is still working on that today. Likewise, during this time, I had many great peers across the technology team in Allstate making great improvements in infrastructure, in cybersecurity, in the way we develop, in what we were developing and deploying.

Wonderful opportunities, again, to take this company and rebuild this ship as a 22nd-century corporation. And so as we were doing this, we both, again, worked in our different areas, but came together every week to sit at the table and look at the common themes, celebrate our bright spot achievements, and look at what we needed to do more of.

And we really, really became aware, one of the big themes for any company transforming is how do you fuel this with the talent that moves everything in the organization? We have over 6,000 people within our technology organization globally. That's a lot of folks. And they're folks that have been really well geared and served us very well, bright folks working in the system we've been in, on this tanker.

Here's a shot of a couple of them in Belfast, Northern Ireland, kind of sitting in the bowels of the ship, as I like to think about it. Nothing too remarkable about the photo. You've probably seen that in workplaces of the past decades, and currently too, if we walked in there today.

We've got the computer we're working on, we've got phones, we've got lots of paper manuals that we can resort to looking up when we need to. Great, brilliant people. This is a great, great team doing work. But again, geared around an aging system.

And part of what we needed to say is, "How do we help each and every person in the organization get the skills, get the vision, get the motivation, and move us along this journey on the transformation? We have 6,000-plus people to take with us. Where do we start?"

And so around that time, I had another career opportunity. I moved on from testing, and I took a role in our international division. That included moving to live and work in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for almost two years. And it was a fantastic experience.

In Northern Ireland, we're known as Allstate Northern Ireland. We don't sell insurance there. It's all about doing the technology and the operations that drive and support our customers in the U.S. and Canada. Again, fabulous place with, at the point I came in, 16 years of great success.

But I came to herald the transformation and make sure we could bring and connect things from the U.S. mothership into Northern Ireland and on through to the company we had set up in India, and to keep everything flowing really well with global delivery between the sites.

So in Northern Ireland alone, I had almost 2,300 people, and when I broke it down by role, I had almost 800 developers. So all of these people, again, how do we serve them best and get them moving while they're delivering for today, driving forward into the future? That was a really key question.

And again, as we came together as leaders at the table and started charting what we needed to do, we realized we needed a broad-based strategy to foster and encourage and continue the success of the different pieces we had done, moving into the cloud, decreasing provisioning cycles, building some CI/CD pipelines in places, doing the test automation, revamping our PMO, just a number of different aspects.

And we threaded it all together and started theming our transformation really clearly with 12 work streams across three areas, taking that systems-thinking view, knowing we need to touch multiple parts of the system to affect the real and the lasting change.

Our business model, that's what we call how we do our work. That's bringing in DevOps. It's lean and agile thinking. It's that global delivery model, really thinking about how all the team works together. Eliminate waste, get things flowing.

The technology, again, multifaceted here, not just things like going to the cloud or how we host technologies, but giving our fellow employees at Allstate the best shot they have at serving the customer, giving them an integrated view of customer data, enabling them in all the ways we work and all the different technologies we can bring forward. As more sensor capabilities emerge, how do we weave those in? What do we do with analytics? But again, while it's one-third of the triangle, also at the core of it all is that question of talent and leadership.

So during this time, again, as I would work in Northern Ireland, but then come together with my global colleagues, and we would think both about playing a role in the enterprise broad transformation and making sure we serve people locally, we had a lot of deliberations. Vast enterprise, many things to get done. How do we prioritize? How do we set things? Most of all, how do we avoid, in all that, the analysis paralysis?

And I'm a firm believer in applying the same principles we want everyone else to practice into how we lead and drive our change initiatives. So I was able, while I was over in Northern Ireland, an interim managing director there, to help and support the team as we built out one of our first lean and agile labs. And we branded this globally under an effort called Compose.

Working with a really excellent team, this is, again, just one thread of our many transformations, but it's one I want to talk about today because I think it really gets to the core of some of what all of us are trying to change when you are trying to change within an enterprise.

We called it Compose. Compose is all about thinking how a composer is able to bring in different instruments and different players and to orchestrate things together to build more and more value. How you can build upon a single thread of music and add more and more over time.

We called it accelerated delivery. There's a lot of focus in our conversations on development, but we recognize it's not just about development. Delivery is about the whole life cycle. It's about meeting your fellow employees and customers every day with the systems they want and need to use, with the capabilities we want to have to support a customer in their moment of need.

And we chose this logo for Compose. Again, very distinct and deliberate that we wanted some visible branding and messaging to people because we know that in an enterprise, a lot of great things, again, develop and change over time. We wanted to very specifically signal a magnitude of change.

And this logo here is intended to represent two people working together. We introduced some pair programming. That's really important. But you also see kind of a person coded blue and green, dev and ops together.

We came up with the construct for Compose and said, "We're going to start." This is something we want it to be, the new way of working, but we've got to start somewhere. So where do we plant our flag? What efforts do we start with?

Well, in Northern Ireland, again, we were able to get started with a group of folks in the lab working on a number of different projects in different ways, and part of it was the visibility. We had some space available, and we were able to build a new lab.

And this is the new way of sitting and working for this team. One of our corporate relations folks saw this picture, and she said, "Well, it doesn't look enough different to me from the first picture." And I said, "Don't worry, I think this crowd will understand the difference."

We've taken away the paper. We've taken away the distraction of the phones. We've got people sitting together. We've got really visible there our pipelines, so we know how things are doing. We've got openness and transparency.

Whether you're a business partner or a technology leader or someone on another team, you can walk up and look. You can go into Pivotal Tracker and view what's going on on different efforts. But most of all, what it says to me is just those smiles and that engagement of folks as a catalyst for the broader change we need to drive.

Because let's face it, in leadership, we can't just lead it by saying, "Great, we'll have DevOps. Great, we'll adopt this tool. Great, we'll do this initiative." It takes all those thousands of people to actually move it, to actually make the call on the ground. When do we flip the tool? On what version?

In leadership, it's our job to give the courage, the empowerment, the recognition for what's going right, the coaching when things aren't going quite right.

So we built up the lab, and the teams had the opportunity to decide, "Well, what are some first things we're going to undertake?" Again, this is when you can easily become a victim of analysis paralysis, I think. Thinking too hard. Well, if we do something too big and visible and it has bumps in the road, we could meet a premature death. But if we do something too small and not visible, we will have invested a bunch and it won't feel significant. What do we do?

Well, we turn it over to the teams who are working in multiple areas, and I want to take just a second to highlight one app they built, which is one internal for our use within the technology group, and it's called MyECC.

Our ECC is our Enterprise Command Center. Most enterprises I know have some structure, and it's our place where we proactively monitor and manage any blips related to our most significant applications and services. And we had a very traditional phone-line, bridge-centered culture around when there is an outage that needs attention, that we get kind of a swarm approach.

And this was part of the thing that had really noted. The swarm approach isn't bad. Again, it's been effective for many years. It's solving the outage. That's much better than no one knowing there's an outage and having prolonged outage. So some of this discipline had been implemented to help make sure we were quick to recover.

But at the same time, as you all know, when you've got to run to fight the fire, you've put down what you really need to focus on your strategic objectives day-to-day. So in the spirit of continuous improvement and how to do things, the team really identified, they said, "We want to build an app that we can put in the hand of you guys in technology leadership so you feel really comfortable that you have immediate access to know what's happening when there is an outage. And you don't need to leave your strategy meeting or whatever else you're doing to come on the bridge and ask us 30 million times, as each one of you comes on, exactly what's happened, who's there, what they're doing, and what we'll do next."

And I thought it was great, and they articulated it just really cleanly here. "We want to help you prioritize your time and add the most value. I'd rather have you signing my PO for the new tools and equipment we need than on the phone line hanging on while we wait for somebody to see if the server's recycled and that fixed the problem."

So some of these things we built, you could argue, "Well, we could have, again, gone out RFP, looked at something commercially, what are we going to implement," et cetera. But instead, again, the team got together. They went to Pivotal Labs, London. They did great customer discovery.

That was really key to the change. Again, modeling the behaviors we want everybody to follow. Going out to ask technology leaders, "What do you want to know when there's a major outage?" Not just fulfilled their need, but I think it created great empathy in all the technology leaders now for what the teams do as they go out and they speak with actual customers or agents of Allstate's or the claims adjusters in the field.

So again, by building this application in itself is not world-changing, but it is life-changing for the leaders who have it. And it allows the team to focus on resolving the outage when it's there. It allows the leaders to feel there's transparency and comfort in what's going on. If I'm running from meeting to meeting and I can look at an outage, I know who's on it. I can actually see the log of what they're deciding to do. If I have a piece of information that really is valuable, I can hit a button and be dialed in and offer that real-time.

So yeah, it's just one example, but to me it was a really powerful one in seeing a team come forward hungry and eager to identify improvements to make, and of a leadership team that said, "That's great. We will give you the time, the space, the funding that's pretty minimal, the chance to do this and to roll it out across the organization." And it generated a lot of excitement, as have the many other efforts we've done, and we've got things we're building that are for customers and agents and various stakeholders across the org.

Along this time as this team worked on this app, again, the question though was, that's been really great for a few of the developers. I love visiting with them and seeing what they're doing. But wow, I've got 800 developers. How am I going to scale this and not make it a 10-year journey to scale it?

So we came up with the idea, one of my colleagues did, of let's bring in the boot camp approach. Just as folks are signing on externally to go to 21- or 24-week boot camps to learn development and come in and get a great job within the company, why can't we boot camp the people that are there today?

We want to boot camp them for full-stack development, ready to create cloud-native apps. We'd adopted Pivotal Cloud Foundry. We want to get them knowledge of that. We want to get knowledge of the new tools. So we created a 12-week boot camp.

Of course, as soon as you say you're going to do that, people say, "All right, now you're..." And I, at this time, was running this organization where we bill people out. Again, we're really accountable for making sure how it's tracked. "So you want to take 30 people for 12 weeks and have them be non-productive?"

No, absolutely not. We learned we can run these boot camps and instead of example project work, we'll bring in real needs, real business problems and needs, pair them with product managers, and actually work on real backlog to deploy so that at the end of 12 weeks we're coming at or near MVP.

Really big experiment at first. We weren't sure what would happen, but last October I said, "Let's make it happen." So a year ago last week, we started in Northern Ireland with the first 30 folks. It was amazing to see the change.

The products they built were really important. They helped us answer some important business questions. I can never undersell that. That's what it's all about at the end of the day. But also what I saw from the people, from the signals we gave them with this physical environment, from the leadership visits we had to answer questions.

But most of all, when we told them they didn't need to ask us to try something, as long as we're within the right bounds, and they're new boundaries, and they're more open boundaries than we've had before. Very exciting experiment.

Those folks graduated in February and we were already ready to go in the pipeline with additional classes. So we now have our fourth class rolling in Northern Ireland. I have a colleague in Bangalore, India, as we speak, who's kicking off the first class there today, and we're getting ready for our third class in the U.S.

So as you can kind of see, if you multiply 30 people by all these cohorts, we're exceeding a couple hundred folks now and building and building on the developer reskilling.

And so I was really excited about that experience, and as we kicked off last November with the accelerator, I was in a really great groove and we were working with the team, again, getting this going in Northern Ireland, coming back to the big table and talking about all the things moving on the big picture.

And one of the things we realized, whether it was in the class or the initial product teams or all the other teams doing great day-to-day work, the leadership thing was to continually reinforce the change: that we're making deliberate change.

We are a hierarchical culture traditionally. It comes with risk aversion. It comes with some military roots of our leadership. It had its time and place, but we knew we needed to let go of command and control and to get into more of a team of teams type of model.

And as we started exploring the various ways to do that, we realized one of the big pitfalls that maybe a number of us had fallen into in the past in our careers is to sit in the conference room in the mornings and come up with great ideas and have someone build a slide deck and go out and spread it among the masses and think it'll get done. No one ever literally thinks that way, but I realize that does happen.

One of the biggest reasons the transformation efforts fail is if we don't walk the talk. And as we really thought more deeply, we started by observations. What are the things that are impeding people from really taking the risks? I want people to go ahead and implement their pipeline, but they're afraid. They're afraid something will go wrong, and they don't yet completely trust that they're going to have the cover for it. They're afraid we're going to change our minds in a few months.

What do we need to go back to? So we went back to values. As a company, we've got a great set of leadership principles. There are a number of them. They include things like we're here to serve and we develop each other, but we decided we needed a set of technology values that would be the litmus test to help us drive this transformation, and here they are.

Again, we value each other, freedom of action, agility with purpose. That's a big one. We're not just changing for the sake of change. So we define these values. But again, we thought about it. This isn't a stone tablet we're carving to hand out. How do we actually look in the mirror every day and realize walking the talk is so important?

So we set just for ourselves, about the 25 people in the senior leadership team, a set of behaviors and said, "We believe if we are demonstrating these behaviors, we will exemplify the values and it will be seen and it will accelerate this transformation."

We even then used the behaviors in some of our all-day meetings where we'd have sessions and dialogue on a particular topic, and when we broke from that, we would self-survey on our phones. Rate yourself. How did you do on a rate of one to five on the behaviors today? How do you think all of your colleagues did? Is there a gap between them? Let's discuss. Where are we low? How do we need to drive change?

We use tools like this, sort of culture hacks, for reinforcing and making sure we really are courageously and candidly supporting each other and really putting it out there to look at this change, not just, again, handing something down and leaving the folks below stranded.

This is still in the process, but again, I've seen great examples of this. We look to live into this in our town halls and our recognition we do. We look now to recognize others throughout the org who are exemplifying the values and to keep checking in with each other on the values.

It sounds so simple, but again, if I think throughout my career, the things that have slowed us down, this to me is a key way to help reduce some of that friction and really get things flowing in the organization. Always go back to the question, why are we doing this? Get out of the really traditional, hierarchically, "Because Opal said so," and get into, "Because this is agility with purpose as we define it."

So all this change has been really exciting at Allstate, and I was in Northern Ireland and picking up speed with the accelerator and our great team there, and I got a great call about my next opportunity, which is this divisional chief information officer for claims.

And very exciting times in the claims world. Just as the whole industry's being disrupted, claims has this great opportunity to go from more traditional paper, manual, travel-based processes to using all the great changes in the digital world.

I'm showing some pictures here. This is a product that we built that's part app and part a sensor booth, so that if you're in a state affected by a heavy hailstorm, we deploy this mobile booth now, and my developers built an app that allows it to take all the sensor scanning from the booth in three minutes, estimate the amount of damage you have and what it'll take to get your car repaired, replacing what would have traditionally been someone looking at each dent. Is that dime size? Is that nickel size? What do we do?

Those are the results in action. There are so many others that I don't have time today to cover, but seeing the team working this way and able to do it and deploy it on a cycle time so that we were ready by the next hailstorm, which you hope you don't have those events, but when you do, you need to be ready in the insurance business. And then ready to turn that fast feedback and build something that was even better for our users.

It's because we've greased the skids of this transformation. It's because of all the different efforts we're doing. There's so many enablers in a broad enterprise, but I can't say enough about, I think, the importance as leaders to really look in the mirror and drive that forward.

So for us, it continues on these different threads here. It is harnessing our own in-house global talent. We have partners too, but we want a great backbone of Allstate talent. Putting in the new tools and infrastructures, investing in these experiments and being okay when they're not optimal outcomes as long as it's on the right timeframe and we haven't put too much at risk to bet the farm.

It's helping us be more customer-centric, achieving speed to value. That's really important to us. Not just the speed, but that value. Getting everybody comfortable with ambiguity. What will be around the corner next? You can't sit here and predict it today. And most of all, reshaping our work environment, not just with the training programs, but with the day-to-day culture.

So I really thank you all for the opportunity to share. As I go about the next couple of days, I really want to hear from you about what you see are challenges if you're in a hierarchical organization looking to unburden that, yet give people some guideposts for advancing the change. Thank you all so much.