How does an 84 year old insurance company transform business and IT groups into a cloud-centric model?
Surprisingly, Allstate’s Matt Curry, Director of Platform Engineering (and prior PayPal “IT Mercenary” for 8 years), says it has a lot more to do with culture, people, and behavior than technology. In this podcast and associated video, Curry talks with Pivotal’s Andrew Clay Shafer about the cultural aspects of implementing cloud platforms.
As a quick background, Allstate was founded in 1931 as part of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, and Allstate went public in 1993. Certainly, a company with $35 billion in revenues and 40,000 employees has its share of legacy systems and legacy thinking compared to modern web and cloud companies. Changing the legacy behaviors was driven by Allstate executives because they genuinely feared insurance was ripe for disruption by technology. So, they empowered IT to build the necessary ethos, processes, and tools to give the company a means for delivering and competing on digital strategies—putting them in a position to continuously innovate.
In the talk, Curry explains how Allstate’s SVP of Infrastructure Services (and prior PayPal VP), Andy Zitney, convinced him to leave PayPal and come to Allstate. Zitney also gave a recent talk on this topic at Cloud Foundry Summit called Developing the Freedom to Disrupt. One of Zitney and Curry’s primary goals was to drive cultural change at a company that was entrenched in its ways. Curry and Shafer dive deeper on the comparison between cultures, and Curry gives his perspective on this challenge given his lengthy experience a web-native, Silicon Valley company. Curry points out, as an example, that canned vendor solutions, gating, and governance aren’t nearly as prevalent in the valley. People in web or cloud-centric start-ups just think about these things differently.
The two also dive into motivations and disconnects that emerge across an organization. Curry explains how sysadmins and developers don’t want to be on a conference call all night because of an issue, but those on the hook for revenue have a different motivation—they don’t want their business model to be disrupted. Curry says that the real story of becoming a cloud company is about aligning all the groups to a common culture and goal. Curry explained that non-cloud companies need to develop innovation muscle and continuous learning to build a hyper-focused, customer-centric mindset instead of deploying some technical tool. While originally well intentioned, the barriers of governance boards, processes, or ITIL can stop motivated developers in their tracks. These same talented and motivated developers, once defeated tend to go work somewhere else fairly quickly.
For all the groups impacted by Allstate’s Pivotal Cloud Foundry plans and deployment, Curry explained the digital consumer—that if Allstate didn’t engage these customers and prospects appropriately, a competitor would. A cloud platform like Pivotal Cloud Foundry certainly helps Allstate get to that point, but that the organization also needs to embrace cultural and process change. This overall change across technologies and processes allows the company to do a better job creating excellent customer experiences and protect revenue.
Curry and Shafer both highlight that the IT mindset of web and cloud-centric companies is different than traditional enterprise IT—if servers go down, you are losing revenue—this is how the entire staff needs to think. They go on to cover the benefits of open source, the experience at Cloud Foundry Summit, and shifts in the collaboration between development and operations.
Coté:
Hey everyone, this is Cote. This week, we’ve got an episode that I’m not in. Except, I’m here mysteriously to explain what’s happening. Andrew recently did one of his videos, “Cloud Foundry In the Light,” as it’s jokingly called, with Matt Curry of Allstate, just talking about what they’ve been doing with their application strategy and Pivotal Cloud Foundry, specifically—kind of a recap of some of the stuff they talked about at the Cloud Foundry Summit. Anyways, I thought it was a great interview. Well, you may have seen the video already. For all the people who haven’t and would rather listen to the audio edition, here it is. With that, enjoy.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
Today, I’m joined by my friend, who I just hung out with last week, Matt Curry. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself Matt?
Matt Curry:
My name is Matt Curry. I work at Allstate as Director of platform engineering. We’re heavily invested in the Cloud Foundry journey, and engaged with Pivotal on that, and using the platform as somewhat of a trampoline to get some momentum behind an organizational transformation where we’re really trying to take our organization and drive innovation and bring innovation to the forefront of what we’re doing as a part of Allstate technology.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
Just for a little framing, and you told me some of this story before, but for the rest of our listeners at home, what did you do before you came over to Allstate?
Matt Curry:
Before I was at Allstate, I spend about eight years at PayPal working in operations, doing some architecture work, and doing some different types of things. I moved around form place to place. I did a performance and capacity stint for a while and then eventually moved into a role that was called an architecture role but was really more of an IT mercenary role going out and solving challenging problems in different areas of the infrastructure related to either code push or automation or different types of problems in operations at PayPal scale.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
IT mercenary.
Matt Curry:
Yeah. I think that’s the unofficial title. It would look good on a business card though.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
From PayPal, what got you over to All State?
Matt Curry:
Andy worked with me at PayPal for a little while. He has kind of this cool way of working where he really enables the people that he trusts. He’s really good at driving cultural change and transformation. He kind of convinced me to come over and help him take an insurance company that was pretty entrenched in its ways and try to drive a cultural change and transformation. That sounded like a really hard problem to me, and I’m interested in solving hard problems. So, I decided to come over, knowing that working hand in hand with him, that we’d get the support we needed and that we’re going to be able to be successful at something like this. This is a really good opportunity to take a swing at it.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
For everyone out there in the wild, this is Andy Zitney, who also just gave a talk at Cloud Foundry Summit about this disruption of transformation. It was explicitly to transform organization, right? It’s not implicit, it’s explicit.
Matt Curry:
Yeah, I know. It absolutely is explicit in everything we do. The ability to go faster and compete, as Andy talked about at Summit. The feeling is that the insurance industry is ripe for disruption. Making sure that we’re able to be out in front of that, and innovate ourselves in such a way that we’re out in front of that is definitely a key part of the operating strategy going forward.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
From the perspective of someone who’s been inside of an organization like PayPal, which I think you kind of have to consider one of the cloud native companies, or at least web native. What are the differences you see from what you saw there coming into an organization like Allstate?
Matt Curry:
I would say that the Silicon Valley community is one part of it, which is people who are web oriented, who are used to kind of developing software as a solution for every problem—approach things slightly differently or maybe drastically differently than folks who maybe are used to consuming pre-canned vendor solutions or are used to process and gating and governance to kind of protect them from risks.
I think what I’ve seen is there’s a lot of these interactions, “Hey, we just need a governance board to sit in front of something and gate it rather than actually codifying what that needs to be and how that problem needs to be solved. I would say that’s one of the bigger cultural shifts I’ve seen for sure.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
There’s a general observations and maybe you can refute it or reinforce how this applies to Allstate. What I’m observing in a lot of these enterprises—as they realize that the risk to their IT and the risk to their core businesses—kind of come from outside the building. The risk of IT and the small self-inflicted problems that people could have if they don’t manage change effectively are relatively small right now compared to the potential for the outside marauders or the Silicon Valley barbarians to disrupt your markets.
Matt Curry:
I think that’s really interesting and a really interesting perspective. I would say the dynamics of that fear of change based on level of the organization. The guy who’s sitting closer to the server is really scared of somebody making an invalid exchange and having to stay on a call all night. C-level executives are much more scared of the Silicon Valley disruption.
There’s this weird dynamic where that thing is a slighter bar. That fear between those two things is maybe some kind of sliderr bar, and it shifts as you move throughout the organization. That creates this really weird disconnect and interesting dynamic between how those people interact and what the end result is from a cultural perspective.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
Fascinating. In a sense, it’s the vantage point from up on top of the hill where you could see the full battlefield is very different than the person that’s in the trench.
Matt Curry:
Yeah.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
How you align. Going back to … We’ve had some of these conversations starting at the … We just met each other last week at the summit, but when you’re talking about cultural transformation, how do you get that vision about what it takes to be competitive? Ultimately, we see this cycle in a lot of industries, the fact that you’re able to work is a privilege. We’re in a very fast-paced, well compensated industry right now, but there’s no reason this will last forever. What can you do inside of an organization to make sure that you, by providing for the health of that organization, are always able to provide that for the organization?
Matt Curry:
I think it’s really about developing. This is why it comes back to culture and not technology. It is because it’s about developing the muscle, about developing the innovation muscle and the ability for the organization to continually learn and continually improve. I think a lot of people miss that and being really hyper focused on, “Well, GitHub uses this chat-ops thing or NetFlix uses Hystrix. That’s this amazing thing and we just need to go do that.”
They’re continually creating those processes and finding ways to continuously improve and make themselves more efficient. Unless you can build that in and start to get people to think that way, you’re never going to be sustainably successful at what you’re trying to drive.
I actually think that’s really the hardest part of this, is to some degree, we can use the tools to start getting people thinking about problems in a different way, but at the end of the day the tools aren’t the solve. It’s not like you just drop them in and you’re, “Okay. We’re good. I’m done.” It’s really about you give people the tools as a way to say, “Hey, we’re going to give you the best of breed tools that other folks are using. You can interact and socialize with other folks who are doing these web type things and understand the tools they’re using to solve problems.” As a way, as a mechanism almost for us to get you to start thinking about problems differently.
Rather than thinking about, “Hey, I need to processize this.” or “I need my new governance board. I need another ticket.” Really, using the tools to facilitate the human element of IT operations and drive collaboration and innovation that way.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
I agree with everything you said. A higher level thing and maybe, this is obviously not a solved problem. How do you connect the IT narrative, and certainly we can get better tools and certainly we can get better processes, back to the high level visions statement or the view of the battlefield so that you can coordinate, not just the fact that you have IT and you can move faster, but you can deliver the right solutions for your customers, the right solutions for your opportunities.
Matt Curry:
Yeah, I’ve seen it done a few different ways. One of the things I’ve really liked is it’s one thing to paint, “Hey, we’re ripe for disruption.” It’s important for people to understand that. You also have to be able to paint a picture of, “This is what we’re building and this is why it’s going to be amazing for our customers. This is how we’re going to change everything. How we’re going to change everything to stay competitive and be out in front of the game.”
Andrew Clay Shafer:
It might be slightly over simplifying, but I frame everything in terms of love and fear. It’s a higher purpose to attach to this thing that we want to do because we love pursuing it. Where we have a disadvantage, in my opinion, if everything is motivated by fear. This scarcity protective mindset of, “Oh, someone out there could disrupt us.” versus, “Hey, here’s a bunch of things we can do to change our world to make it better.”
Matt Curry:
Yeah. I think that’s where you … I think from traditional industry, we’re starting in the fear spot, but, where you want to get to, is a very good point—the way you articulate it is where you don’t even worry about what your competition is really doing, and you’re just really hyper focused on delivering an experience for your customers.
One thing I’ve talked about a lot is when I first got to Allstate, a couple of folks had asked me a question, “Why do we need to do this? Why do we need to change? We’re as good as our best competitor. Why does this need to happen?” My answer generally is, we have this whole generation who lives on a mobile device, and when they’re using the Allstate applications on their mobile device, they’re not actually comparing us to another insurance company because they probably don’t have one. They’re comparing us to Facebook, Google, Twitter, or whatever other applications are on their device. The level of engagement we’re going to be able to drive with those customers is dictated by their perception of how great that experience is versus the experiences they’re used to from these disruptive web companies.
At the end of the day, like I said, I think you have to be able to drive hyper customer focus where you’re just saying, “I always want to be better for that individual, for that customer and for us as well, it’s a huge part of our business. We want to be better for the agents as well and give them an experience where they’re just blown away by the efficiency and the ability to use the new tools, the next generation technology.”
That experience flows very seamlessly from what they’re used to interacting with, those web type companies, and that it doesn’t feel they’re stepping back 10 years to use our products.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
The language you’re choosing just resonates with something I deeply believe which is that software is really all about creating experiences. All the things that you see with NetFlix and Uber, and the rest of this is really about that experience and it’s less about the facts that there are computers involved. That’s just something that facilitates the experience.
Matt Curry:
Right.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
We were just back to this notion of Silicon Valley. We’re hanging out in Santa Clara, the Cloud Foundry Summit, and you have perspective and some DNA from Silicon Valley ecosystem. Maybe we could talk a little bit about what we saw or what you saw at the Cloud Foundry Summit and then how Cloud Foundry fits into your world view coming from a place like PayPal and whatever platform you guys have built there.
Matt Curry:
I have actually been a Cloud Foundry fan for a little while even before it was an on-premises thing. When we were at PayPal, we ended up collaborating with the eBay guys. The eBay guys had created their own platform as a service that was largely orchestration around OpenStack. Here, coming into Allstate, we’ve purchased that from a vendor but also it’s an open solution. That’s fantastic because it’s not like the typical vendor engagement where it’s a black box that sits at the core of our platform.
We actually have the ability to collaborate with Pivotal directly. We have the ability to collaborate with the Cloud Foundry Foundation directly and influence product direction a little bit more than we might have with typical vendor engagement, kind of your standard large scale IT enterprise vendors.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
Because I already know a bit of your story, I wore my Cloud Foundry loves OpenStack shirt.
Matt Curry:
Nice. I like that.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
Those are a Josh McKenty special.
Matt Curry:
Yeah. The coming out of OpenStack summit this last week, I think it’s February, right?
Andrew Clay Shafer:
That’s right. We had back to back summits.
Matt Curry:
Yeah. It’s different, and it’s a good kind of different. I’m excited. I actually think that what you guys have at Pivotal, what you’ve built at Pivotal is pretty special. I think the bench of people is the best of Silicon Valley. That is almost as big of a sell as the product itself. How many opportunities do you get as an enterprise to be able to really tap into the best and brightest coming out of the Bay Area and have them challenge you to think differently about technology and organization.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
I didn’t pay you to say this, and I didn’t want to turn this into a Pivotal commercial, but I’m actually excited and I want to hear how you felt about just that whole ecosystem. Not just Pivotal, not just Allstate, but I felt like there was actual excitement around this movement to see there’s over 1500 people you serve for Cloud Foundry Summit, and everything I went to is basically standing room only. I thought it was just … It’s amazing … I’ve been part of Puppet, I’ve been part of OpenStack. It’s just another wave of people just really thinking hard and getting excited about the possibilities of being able to do things in a different way.
Matt Curry:
Yeah. I think people were very excited. We made a lot of good contact with our peers in the industry, folks that are contributing into the foundation and playing a good part. We had tons of good conversation about where this is going. The benefits, and I thought it was really cool to see people thinking about the self-service platform where it’s really focused on developers as a first class citizen. Coming out of the traditional enterprise.
I think the dichotomy of that giant wall that sits between ops and dev is taller in the enterprise than it is anywhere else. Even though that dynamic exist in more of the web-based companies, I think that it exists to a much lesser degree. To just see that and not only see it but see the excitement about it both from … There are developers there listening to Matt Stine’s talk about how do you develop and deploy micro service architectures to mostly purely ops guys. It was really cool to see the conversation start to change in our industry around bringing those things together.
I don’t actually like to use the term devops, but I will say the empathy has changed. There’s more empathy for the person that’s sitting on the other side of the wall than I have traditionally seen and especially in that audience. I think that’s really cool and exciting from my perspective.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
I think this actually, with your background at PayPal and then coming into something like you’re at Allstate, the context of a web company. If you have that high of a wall, you’re going to go out of business. It’s an existential thing to bring that down to some reasonable size of wall because it’s no longer … One of the things that I feel, I’m observing, not just insurance but really large, large swath of industry is that, in enterprises where their core business had nothing to do with IT, IT was this supporting “cost center” a self-fulfilling prophecy, that there wasn’t any part of the value chain that really flowed through IT. You establish these processes and these mindsets and these identities, and then ingrain them overtime, and now we’re decades into this.
That idea of someone who runs a server that keeps the mail going, and I always half jokingly say they had to run the printers. In many cases they did. Then that’s a very thing than something like you see at either NetFlix or a Facebook or a Etsy or a PayPal where, if those servers are down and those applications are not running, that’s the whole business. There’s no other value chain. It’s not just that you can get e-mail for a couple of hours. That’s whole thing. That’s the whole point of existence.
I think that alone is what drove some of the word you didn’t want to say which is the devops word. It’s like you have to understand the application as an operator, and as a developer, you have to understand the infrastructure or you’re just not going to have a business at all.
Matt Curry:
Right. I think the other thing that’s happens is, as we’ve moved further along the road with technology and this stuff is less new, that technology is now playing a much bigger part in that value chain than it ever has before even in traditional business. That may have driven some of this conversation just naturally.
I think I saw something on Twitter fairly recently that Wall Street Journal was going to change the name of one of their sections, like business and technology, because it’s not just about business anymore, that technology is playing such a deep role in that value chain and in the sustainability of business itself. That it has change this conversation in dynamic.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
This is a related thing that was said on the stage by James Waters when he was giving his little slide show with Josh about what we really believe. This is the kind of the diaspora or the spreading of these web centric mindsets, is that for the enterprises, they’re going to transition and be long term and be long term software enterprises that their future looks suspiciously like places like Google and Facebook’s past.
I’m just curious how you would see that or how you would frame what you’re going through with Allstate and also considering this stuff with Paypal moving forward.
Matt Curry:
I would agree, although, I think it’s different a little bit. Like we were talking about earlier, even if we got to where those guys were today, it might not be enough, if we haven’t built in the ability to figure out what the next step is on our own. That culture of continuous improvement.
It’s not like there is a destination. It’s just like the next point on the map is this. We got to keep doing that, and we have to create a way where we just continue to do that and, “Okay. The next place we need to go is here or the next place we need to go is here, the next place we need to go is here.”
Eventually, hopefully, maybe it looks like how it looks today for those guys, but maybe it looks different or slightly different because our business model is not the traditional technology business model. We need to figure out a way to use that to our advantage rather than as an impediment.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
Absolutely. I totally agree that. You should not give up the context and the advantages you have on a space. For me, and I don’t know what Allstate has planned, but I certainly look at people’s plans for doing their mobile strategy and their internet of things strategy and the rest of these types of things they want to do. For many of them, when you start to do the math of what it’s going to take to support this transaction rate at this scale, and the types of infrastructures they have to build, just doing the back doing the back of the napkin calculation, are going to be vastly different from a scale perspective than anything they’ve ever had to deal with before. If they’re going to approach that with the ITIL driven change management process that they’ve adopted, then they’re in for a world of hurt.
Matt Curry:
Right. I think it would be super cool to see a company like Allstate get to the point where they’re writing their own file system because they’re running at such massive scale. I hope we get there at some point, and the technology and engineering talent is so ingrained in our DNA that those are the things that become problems that are front of mind rather than more core business problems, where they become so highly aligned with core business problems because we’re driving so much engagement, traffic and business through technology.
I do think that’s one thing that’s really different when you look at what happens in Silicon Valley. These guys are building generic technology solutions that, in some cases, get open sourced like at NetFlix, right? They built Hystrix, and they built all these things to monitor and manage and maintain and grow and scale their architecture.
We’re going to be able to ride on their coattails for a while, and that’s really cool because we can go address the problems that are more core to our business model.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
That’s the beauty of open source is … The beauty of open source is you don’t need to write a file system until that’s the breaking point. If that’s a differentiator for you, you’re probably at a scale that most people have never seen this.
Matt Curry:
Yeah. I think that is the thing. A lot of people want to be the web company, but you don’t necessarily have to be to be hugely successful. Those problems may not be core to what you’re trying to do, what you’re trying to solve. But your point about the culture and the enablement and the way of thinking and the continuous improvement and always finding a better way no matter what your competition is doing is absolutely what people need to take away from looking at those firms.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
That’s a point I’ve been trying to drive into people for a few years now is that people look at a place like Amazon or NetFlix and they really focus on the tools and the APIs and the technical aspect of it. You have Werner Vogels in public talking about their process and the two pizza teams and the developers run the applications. I don’t see a lot people rushing to replicate those patterns or at least as much as I think they would if I was in charge of their business.
Matt Curry:
Yeah. I think that’s really interesting. It’s like it’s almost as if traditional firms don’t really believe that that’s the way they do it, like it’s a big lie. It’s, “Oh, look at all these cool stuff.” They don’t really do things that way. They must … something else.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
They must be lying to us.
Matt Curry:
Yeah. It’s this really weird thing. Then you see some enterprises try and enable that journey and they pick the lowest hanging fruit they possibly could or they don’t invest enough, believe that that transformation needs to happen. It either takes forever and slowly fizzles because of change in leadership, or it just doesn’t really get the momentum that it needs to get to drive the transformation at the level people want.
There has to be this belief, and you have to be so committed to it that when the deadlines come and the fear sets in, that you hang on even tighter rather than wanting to abandon ship and go back to what you know.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
Whatever your muscle memory is, whatever your twitch reflexes are. I think it’s hard to transform halfway. That is part of the problem.
Matt Curry:
Yeah, it really is.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
I know you have work to do. It’s always a pleasure. I could sit and talk about a lot of this stuff all the time. I think that the other thing I want to work on for the next time we hang out is we need you to eat the sea urchin.
Matt Curry:
All right, you got yourself a deal.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
We’ll make sure we can get some of that sushi action going again.
Matt Curry:
All right, that sounds awesome man.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
Do you have any other parting wisdom and then we’ll call it a day?
Matt Curry:
No. Just really looking next for the summit next year and telling our story. We think it’s going to be the best story to tell …
Andrew Clay Shafer:
One more quick comment, and then we’ll call it because I think this relate, because I know you’re hiring. I’m certainly hiring. It’s especially interesting to watch these enterprises and when they complain about the lack of the skills on the market. In reference to that, one of my favorite responses is from Adrian, he was at NetFlix, who when someone called him and said, called him out, and said that you guys are special, you’re NetFlix. You have a lot of talent. You can do these things because your talent is so much better. Adrian said, “We hired them from you.” You look at most of our resumes, and we hired most of our talent from the enterprise.
Matt Curry:
Right. Yeah, it’s true man. Everything we said it goes back to culture and building that muscle memory. Learning how to develop people. Learning how to innovate. Learning how to get people so they feel empowered.
There is a lot of folks in the enterprise who have really fantastic ideas, and, unfortunately, the barriers to entry to see those ideas realized is just too high, and they don’t really feel like they can take it any further. They either go try and do something on their own and sometimes that turns into a successful startup that could have been organic within your firm. Sometimes, it doesn’t go anywhere and a good idea was just wasted because your people don’t really feel enabled to innovate. We want to turn that on it’s head for sure.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
I met some of your team and I just want to impress on everyone. Hopefully you agree that for most of these enterprises, they already have the talent in their building, they just need to unlock it. They just need to reframe the way that they work…more than go find a magic unicorn to come help them.
Matt Curry:
Yeah, completely agree. Completely agree.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
Sometimes it takes … You got to hire a guy from PayPal to help you see that.
Matt Curry:
Yes. Hire somebody that you’re going to empower to actually tell you things you don’t want to hear, and go do those things even if it’s not what you want to hear. Definitely coming in, the tiniest thing, like getting whiteboards or ordering laptops for developers that aren’t bogged down with all crazy software that’s unnecessary or whatever. All of that contributes to the culture, and changing it is very difficult, and it’s widespread, and it’s a big challenge, and you have to enable whoever that person is to go drive those conversations, and have conversations with people about what we’re really after, and how it affects the behaviors of the individuals that we’re trying to empower.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
It’s like when you haven’t worked out for a while and you decided you want to get in shape that some of those first workouts are a little less pleasant than you hope.
Matt Curry:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
But it’s the best thing for you, you just got to go through it.
Matt Curry:
That’s right.
Andrew Clay Shafer:
All right. Until next time and we’ll definitely do sushi again. I’m not sure when I’ll see you in person but I’m sure I will. I’m really excited obviously. Cloud Foundry is a big thing that we’re working on. I’m glad we could be part of your journey.
Matt Curry:
Yeah man, me too. It’s going to be awesome. I look forward to hanging out again and catch you on the flip side.
How does an 84 year old insurance company transform business and IT groups into a cloud-centric model?