00:00 Introduction: Welcome to Tech Talk, a podcast featuring employees and leaders discussing all things tech at Mutual of Omaha. Join us to learn what tech professionals can gain from a career with us. Let’s talk tech.
00:12 Brian Poppe: All right. Welcome everyone, to another episode of Tech Talk, sponsored by Mutual of Omaha. I’m Brian Poppe. I am head of the business unit we call Income and Wealth Planning. Your former Chief Data Officer formerly worked on tech modernization as well. So, we are here to talk about all things technology and highlight some of the cool work and great people that we’ve got working here at Mutual. I’m joined today with my co-host.
00:37 Maura Ramsey: Hello, everyone. I am your co-host, Maura Ramsey. I am an I/T Associate Business Program Consultant here at Mutual of Omaha. Welcome to our podcast.
00:47 Brian Poppe: So, joining us today is one of those special guests is Jerry Sayre. Jerry, how are you?
00:53 Jerry Sayre: Hey, pretty good, Brian. Good to be here.
00:57 Brian Poppe: Yeah. You want to give us a little bit of your background and why we might have invited you here today and we’ll get into some of those good topics?
01:05 Jerry Sayre: Well, thanks, Brian. My name is Jerry Sayre. I lead the Enterprise Business Platform Laboratory Division within the Information Technology Department at Mutual of Omaha. I lead a division that’s basically focused on building out a new ecosystem of solutions to support our future state in the business of insurance. So, we’re focused primarily on things around integrating solutions from, you know, basically various vendors and partners that we have, as well as tying them together with a series of standard industry patterns.
01:50 Jerry Sayre: A lot of our focus is on knowledge management and how we tie that into those solutions, as well as how we can use that knowledge management in order to create solutions that we can deploy faster and manage more effectively.
02:06 Brian Poppe: Yeah, right on. And one of the one of the fun things about Jerry is, you used to be in Omaha and now with the ability to work remotely, you have moved somewhere else. Jerry, where are you joining us from today?
02:17 Jerry Sayre: Hey, I’m joining you from Colorado. I moved out to Colorado last year and it’s been just a blessing. It was one of the mixed benefits of Covid, right? The fact that we suddenly can work remote. So, through discussions with our CIO and a lot of people in leadership I got permission to move out here and have really enjoyed that opportunity.
02:41 Brian Poppe: Yeah, I’m joining you from the Home Office. And if you all are long time viewers of tech talk, you’ll know Maura is joining us from Chicago.
02:52 Maura Ramsey: Yes, I definitely chose the city life over mountain life, but maybe someday. Jerry, tell us a little bit more about your career path at Mutual. How did you get to where you are today?
03:03 Jerry Sayre: So, I worked in our Information Technology Department initially as an engineer. I did that for about a decade and then moved into Architecture. And, like many careers within Mutual of Omaha, you know, it’s had many parts. You know, that’s been the interesting part about my career at Mutual Omaha that I’ve lived in different roles and led in different ways. So, I started out as an Engineer, became an Architect, became a manager, and then a director, then a VP. And now, I’m the Chief Software Engineering Officer. So, it’s been an amazing experience. All of the coaching and growth that I’ve been through in my career and honestly, the variety of opportunities that I’ve been able to explore has been a real interesting part.
03:57 Jerry Sayre: So, you know, it never felt pigeonholed. I probably haven’t made as many large changes as Brian has in his career, but yeah, I have moved around quite a bit.
04:12 Brian Poppe: So, Jerry, in your current role as Chief Software Engineer, one of the things I think our audience might be interested in is how we’re handling open-source software. Can you talk a little bit about how we’ve adopted that, and where you see that going in the future?
04:25 Jerry Sayre: Yeah, we’ve embraced open source for a long time. Honestly, when you look at the solutions that we’re both building and getting vended, a lot of them rely upon a lot of the open source that the rest of the industry uses. So, we’re huge proponents of open source. We don’t necessarily contribute to open source right now, but we do consume it significantly. You know, when you look at all of the solutions that are available, most of them are incorporating open source and you see that in cloud offerings as well as on prem offerings as well. We’ve leveraged a lot of open-source and a lot of industry techniques in order to build out our continuous integration, continuous development, build pipelines, as well as a lot of the technology that we use to do test automation and even a lot of the underlying infrastructure that we’re running our business on. We are heavily invested in open source.
05:28 Brian Poppe: Yeah, that’s great. Sounds a lot like how I work with social media where I consume a
lot but don’t contribute a whole lot.
05:36 Jerry Sayre: Now we have contributed in the past Brian, but it’s been through third parties, right? We will engage with somebody else in order to do contributions on our behalf. But we’re very careful of what we do there.
05:52 Maura Ramsey: So, Jerry, while you’re modernizing a lot of what we’re doing, how do you foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement as we’re working through all these modernizations in technology?
06:04 Jerry Sayre: So, a lot of what you need to do if you’re trying to foster a continuous learning environment is to kind of define paths forward for people. One of the things that we’ve worked on is basically doing what we call an Engineering Skills Assessment on a biannual basis.
I mean, this really points out, you know, what we are expecting and that the technology growths that we’re seeing and that we need in the future. So, this was based off of the software engineering body of knowledge, which is basically an IEEE standard reference material. We really wanted to ground in what the industry has and expects as well as paint a picture of career growth for our people.
06:55 Jerry Sayre: So, you know, as you are progressing through your career at Mutual of Omaha you have good insight into where you are at and what you need to do in order to advance. So, you know, much like my career, Brian’s career, and a lot of other people at Mutual of Omaha, we have a path forward for how you grow and build and, you know, achieve that what motivates you.
07:23 Maura Ramsey: From a newer employee at Mutual of Omaha. I’m a very goal-oriented person, so I’ve definitely appreciated how that that skillset assessment has been laid out, really helps me know where I need to advance and know what I’m working towards. So, I’ve always really appreciated that, that format for that, that assessment.
07:44 Brian Poppe: So, speaking of that skillset assessment, how does that tie in with where we are taking EBP, the Enterprise Business Platform Group?
07:55 Jerry Sayre: A lot of the focus on the Engineering Skillset Assessment has to deal with generalized engineering concepts around software development, but also Cloud development and Cloud infrastructure in code structures. So that’s where we’ve gone with EBP. As we’ve been building out the solutions that we deploy as part of the new ecosystem, as well as when we’re building those integrations or other components that integrate in with that, we’ve ensured that they are basically leveraging infrastructure is code, are deployable through our CI/CD pipeline and then basically do a deploy when ready type of structure.
08:40 Jerry Sayre: So, we do a significant number of deployments on EBP. In fact, we have a Tuesday standard, one that we deploy on but will deploy any day of the week, as necessary. To support that it requires some pretty solid commitment to engineering practices. You know, you need to have a lot of code coverage, you need to have good code quality and your testing and your testing practice and the way you validate the software has to be pretty mature as well.
So those are a lot of the things that we focused on inside of EBP as we’ve been developing solutions and integrating solutions.
09:23 Maura Ramsey: Well, we’ve got a lot of cool things going on in your neck of the woods. I wanted to know what advice do you have for someone that is interested in applying for a position at Mutual?
09:33 Jerry Sayre: I would encourage you to apply. You know, some of the things that we’re looking for is really, as we’ve talked about here, a learning mindset as well as an ability to show growth over time. You know, a lot of what we’re focused on right now is work within basically JEE as well as AWS construct. So those are, you know, some of the core technologies that we work in.
But, you know, familiarity with open-source and a lot of the JavaScript frameworks is also helpful. So, I would just say really what we’re shopping for are people that fit our culture and we’re willing to invest in people as you know by my career and other people within Mutual of Omaha. You know, we invest in people, and we grow people.
10:30 Brian Poppe: It’s good advice Jerry. Thanks for joining us today.
10:34 Jerry Sayre: Thanks, Brian. Appreciate it.
10:39 Brian Poppe: Yes, on behalf of me and Maura and the rest of us here at Mutual of Omaha, thanks for joining us today for a tech talk. We will see you again soon.
10:48 Maura Ramsey: See ya, bye.