BST North American Summit 2013: AIG's Mary Kotch on Smaller Footprints, Better Talent

Kotch─who also spoke at last year's New York-based BST event on the importance of getting the "people equation" right─used her keynote to bring hard numbers to AIG's recent projects: $10 million in new post-Sandy business continuity processes (BCP) for its 10,000 New York area staff; several million spent on new cyber war games that test both in-house infrastructure and connectivity as well as third-party providers' monitoring capabilities; spend on new workplace devices dramatically cut with Dell Wyse devices that facilitate virtualization and work-from-anywhere policies, rather than traditional desktops; and above all, a massive reduction in the number of the insurance giant's datacenters, which have historically numbered as many as 80 globally.

She says all of those, though, have only proven successful because an existing, if "not particularly sexy" foundational platform that helps AIG's IT team make decisions about application performance, decommissioning, and sunsets─essentially, executing a concerted application portfolio strategy across its business lines and geography.

"Shrinking our number of applications is something I live and breath─it's even incentivized as part of my bonus at the end of this year. You can have great tech projects, using big data engines like Natezza [an IBM field programmable gate array implementation] or Hadoop, for example, but sometimes you have to take a step back. If you don't have a real plan, and actual business partners, for these things, you're ultimately just moving hardware around, and down the line, it can really hurt you."

Part of Kotch's work in the past year has also involved her new additional role as CIO for the firm's 16-country Latin American presence. There, she has helped rationalize IT infrastructure teams, which were often replicating .net and Microsoft SQL server-related tasks, while adding more personnel and processes dedicated to data security, and bulking up an IT hub in Guadalajara, Mexico. "We simply can't make those decisions without the data to understand our app footprint," she explains.

Talent Management

The other thing needed to transform an organization of AIG's size─it was once five separate entities─back into a single firm is good people. "With every new role I've taken on in this process, the first thing I do is look at the talent," the CTO says. "You have to understand that the greatest folks on your team─the ones who communicate well, complete programming plans, manage financials─always have other opportunities and offers. If you're not investing in them, retaining them, you won't be successful. You can't just rely on your vendors."

AIG's technologists working on the data center consolidation initiative, in particular, have garnered a close eye from Kotch. "That [type of project] burns people out," she says. "You have to understand their issues, create growth development plans, and ways for them to get the education they desire, or a mentor for them to become IT program managers, which we've done with our young professionals program and targeted events, like one we just had for women in IT. Those are working─because we know other firms have tried to poach our people, but almost always without success. And it's not always easy. I know many of us in technology are introverts."

She says the whole process has also been helped by CEO Bob Benmosche, who after taking over a firm in crisis after its rescuing by the US government in 2009, hasn't wavered in providing the institutional support required for broad technology transformation; in fact it was a central component of the post-crisis firm's Harborside program, AIG's blanket internal rebranding and reorganization initiative. That priority was never a given, Kotch says.

"It really helps when you're able to bring on a chief data officer [Heather Wilson] like we did, and with a strong data management platform already in place, she doesn't need to be convincing people for money. Our CEO took a big risk to invest this much in IT, considering all the business problems we had at that point."