Organizational Changes in the Strategy, Information, and Technology Group

Chief Information Officer Nimesh Mehta made the following announcement on Thursday, April 21:

We have grown and matured tremendously as an organization over the last decade. In Marshall Goldsmith’s words, “What got you here won’t get you there.” We need to change, evolve, continue to innovate and transform to succeed in the future. As we prepare for the future, we must have an organizational structure that supports this journey. Our organization needs to create scale and capacity to support the initiatives we have in the future while balancing workloads, creating synergies, merging silos and aligning better with our business.

In light of this, we are making the following changes in the IT and Data organizations. The SBT organization will continue as-is with no changes at this time.

Our applications organization has grown over the years to support our business and our infrastructure has also expanded to support our growth momentum. To continue our journey, we will now have applications areas that focus on Systems of Engagement (externally facing systems) led by Varun Kumar and Systems of Record (internally facing systems) led by Wanda Catoe. Our newly formed IT Shared Services team led by Michael Morey will continue to push the envelope in cloud services, automation, and observability.

With these changes, the CTO organization under Varun will now take on an expanded scope in addition to Architecture and Field Technology to include Systems of Engagement including:

  • New Business and Underwriting (led by Magesh Elangovan)
  • Digital (led by Fernando Viana)

Core systems, also known as Systems of Record, will continue to report to Wanda Catoe.  These include:

  • Product Development & Illustrations Applications domain (led by Rajmohan Nalumuru)
  • Inforce Applications including Production Operations (led by Jagan Kandunuri)
  • Investments & ESI Applications (led by Victor Zminkowski)
  • Corporate & Enterprise Applications (led by Molly DiStefano)
  • Quality Engineering & Assurance (open).
  • In addition, a new Application domain is being created for “Finance & Risk” to enhance our focus and capacity to support the transformational project demand in this area.

The IT shared services organization lead by Michael Morey, will include:

  • Sara Palmisano taking on leadership of End User Services that will include Service Desk, Deskside support, Audio Visual efforts, and Desktop engineering.
  • Nate Jewett will lead the IT Service Management teams that include change, incident, problem, RCA, and Disaster Recovery.
  • Lucas Berger will continue his leadership for our infrastructure engineering and cloud teams.

Data is an asset, and our journey thus far has been a leap forward into the future. We are continuing our efforts to aggressively recruit for our Head of Data role. The Data Governance team led by Patrick Meany will report this new leader once the role is filled.

Our security teams led by Becky Palmer, SBT teams led by Elizabeth MacGowan, and technology business management team lead by Kathy Naumann will remain unchanged.

Please see the revised Org Chart here reflecting the above changes that are effective immediately.

I cannot stress enough that our success depends on people, not just technology, as teams are our secret sauce. I am excited to take this journey with the team as we mature and “Digitally Enable” National Life for the future!

#NLStrong

Nimesh