Prudential Financial[NYSE: PRU]

For anyone who has built an organizational capability, it is no secret how challenging it can be. When the goal of that capability is to bring about transformational change and solve big problems, the challenge is great, and the expectations are high. That is the charge for technology and data capabilities today.

As Prudential’s inaugural chief data officer (CDO), I believe our role as CDOs is to enable leaders across the business to see and realize the opportunities that are unlocked when data is used in new and ambitious ways. Together, we can bring in the right mix of talent, technology, and data to bring transformative visions and strategies to life. 

So, what does it take to build a transformative capability within an organization? Here are four strategies I’ve learned, and because they are foundational steps that hold for any tech leader doing this work, they are less specific to data and more universal to our industry: 

Note the goalposts –

1. Link your strategy to the overall purpose

An organization’s purpose is its calling card. It is key to attracting and retaining talent and to providing focus and motivation for strategy and execution. Purpose accomplishes this by helping to connect the dots for your teams: from purpose to mission to strategy to execution. Each of these is increasingly reliant on how we leverage the right technology. 

Your technology and data strategy should be clear about how it will fuel the enterprise’s purpose in innovative and differentiated ways. It will also serve as the framework against which you will make crucial decisions and set priorities.

Understandably, the complexity of some organizations can cause people to want to descope. Prudential is just as complex, but its leaders have outlined the company’s purpose in its most simple form – to make lives better by solving the financial challenges of our changing world – and provided a clear vision for the future with the support of a multi-pronged strategy. With purpose as a north star, resource allocation, work prioritization, and benefit articulation are made much easier. 

2. Establish a game plan and play to your strengths

My role at Prudential is to deliver industry-leading employee and customer experiences leveraging data, data analytics, and data science. Along the way, we are creating efficiencies, providing better visibility for the business, and increasing productivity with cutting-edge solutions. I can’t do any of this successfully without a game plan, which begins by establishing effective business partnerships for myself and my teams.  

The chief data office does this by using a hub-and-spoke operating model. Our hub teams lead the practice of data governance and platform modernization. Our spoke teams specialize in using data to drive differentiated outcomes, specifically with data science and business intelligence skills. This model encourages alignment with business partners as our team members in the “spokes” build business cases with their partners for future work. This also helps teams manage demand because they have shared business priorities and can agree on how to use available resources. 

Next is clear technology architecture and standards: for us, having this in place allows team members’ time to be spent on executing business priorities rather than figuring out what tools or architecture patterns should be used. 

With a strong operating model and team in place, you can tackle the company’s big challenges. An example of this is within our life insurance business, where we’ve applied data and AI to address key customer pain points, such as the lengthy medical exams often required before being approved for a life insurance policy. As a result of our team’s work, 52% of customers’ life insurance applications are now expedited without a medical exam. That’s great for customers and saves the business over $18M a year. These successes help to build an appetite for greater investment into the capability we’re building. 

3. Create your roster and never stop training: Set a talent vision to drive your tech vision

The last few years have shown us that top talent is not an infinite resource in our industry. For that reason, your talent investments should speak to your broader goals. We are hyper-focused on attracting diverse external technology and data talent and have grown our data science department by over 66% in the first three quarters of 2022. We also encourage the professional growth of our current tech professionals with upskilling and reskilling opportunities. Both streams of talent bring a broad range of perspectives and ideas to our decision-making and execution. 

Another element of Prudential’s strategy is to de-silo, encouraging our business teams to be tech-savvy and our tech teams to be business-savvy. To execute that more effectively, we have adopted a test-and-learn Agile approach that emphasizes collaboration and results, with team members from across technology, businesses, and functions coming together to focus on the customer. 

We can think about it this way: as individual leaders, we each have about 40-60 hours per week. But if our working team of 100 understands our strategy and is aligned with a common vision or purpose, we have 4,000-6000 hours each week to drive strategy and outcomes.   

4. Bring it Together: Enable Transformative work

Enable your team to build trusted advisor relationships with business and technology partners. Go beyond projects that bring about incremental improvement and aim to reimagine. 

Each team member should understand how their work and their team’s work contributes to the execution of data strategy and, therefore, business strategy. 

Leading teams that are helping drive transformation on a large scale won’t always be easy, but having the foundation of a purpose-driven culture and measurable goals will keep things grounded. When your teams are enabling the solution to big opportunities, they build confidence and become not only experts but your best ambassadors to the business.

Tech and data have always been areas of fast-paced change. As leaders, we must be agile while demonstrating a spirit of collaboration in order to build new capabilities amidst the change. Transformation is fostered by nourishing strong partnerships across the business. They will help you know when the inevitable pivots come and to continue to outperform.