Elevating the Customer Experience

Maureen Welcome to Tech on Deck podcast, brought to you by Fidelity Investments. I'm your host, Maureen Olejarz, CIO of Enterprise Software Engineering. Adam And I’m Adam Ely, Head of Digital Products and Engineering. Adam Each episode takes listeners inside the walls of a FinTech industry. Maureen Anything from cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, cloud and crypto to the intersection of product and technology. Adam Tech on Deck breaks down the topics top of mind for technologists today. Maureen Plus, we'll give you insight into the exciting and challenging careers in FinTech. Maureen Welcome back to another episode of Tech on Deck. I'm Maureen Olejarz head of software engineering at Fidelity. Adam And I'm Adam Ely. Excited to let everyone know I have a new role here at Fidelity as the Head of Digital Products and Engineering. Maureen Okay well Adam, first, congratulations. And let's figure out in a future episode of the podcast how we can spend some time learning more about the new role, the new team and everything. For now, what I'd like to do is introduce today's guests and give a hearty welcome to Alicia Spradlin, who is the head of Enterprise Infrastructure Operations at Fidelity, and Keith Blizard, head of production services at Fidelity. Maureen Alicia, Keith, welcome to our podcast. Alicia Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Keith Yeah, thank you so much. Adam Alicia Keith, if y'all could. Why don't you give us and some of the listeners a little intro into your your background. Tell us about yourself a little bit, maybe. Alicia, we'll start with you. Alicia Great. Yeah. So I've been here at Fidelity for just over one year. I can't believe it. It's flown by. That's my team here at Fidelity. We support our internal I.T. incidents. We work as the main point of contact with the organization. From an incident perspective and from a technology standpoint, we work very, very closely with Keith's organization. As we think about the environment and the tools and the processes that we use and our paths cross on a daily basis. Maureen And Keith Keith and I'm Keith Blizard. I've been here just over four and a half years. So this year I hit my five year anniversary at Fidelity. And as Alicia mentioned, we partner a lot together. I run what's called production services and with that SRE chapter in mindset. So for us, how do we take the resiliency observability automation on how we support all the applications across the firm? Keith And so, you know, every day there's something different, you know, with respect to planned and unplanned events in the market, you know, our job is how do we build that muscle and all the different components and process technology, and we're just supports all those planned and unplanned events. Adam You know, I want to say, Alicia, I can't believe you've been here a year. I remember when you were interviewing, I remember when you started and like, it feels like it was like last week. I'm like super surprised it’s been a year. I'm glad it's been a good year with you. I'm super surprised. So congratulations on crossing that one year when your is always a big milestone. Alicia Thank you. Maureen And Keith and Alicia, thank you both. We're really excited to dive into your experience at Fidelity. And the reason we had both of you is that between the two of you, with the size and breadth of Fidelity and our businesses, you both cover, you know, one, a wide breadth of ground, but also really critical functions for the firm. Maureen So what I thought would be helpful for our listeners is really just to, you know, dive into basically some of the things that you do. And we'll go through this in the podcast, but you know, what are the skills that you look for, the culture, what kinds of things are important to you? And I guess what we also wanted to note was that Tammy Gilbert, who is the CIO for Enterprise Operations in Infrastructure in Fidelity, was a previous guest on the podcast. Maureen So for anyone who interested and, you know, really wants to hear more about how Fidelity does this, what we're thinking about the kinds of skills, resources and people that we're looking for, you know, please, please go back and pull that one up. So, Keith, I'll start with you. What does operations in resiliency mean to you and why is it so vital in the FinTech industry today? Keith Yeah, it's a it's a great question. So, you know, what keeps us motivated is how do we make sure we're always available for our customers? And, you know, with our size and what we cover on a daily basis with all the different types of customers we have, you know, with retail customers, our 401K business and, and working with even institutional clients on on their daily activities. Keith You know, for us to be able to manage and be available at all times and we have a lot of pride in ourselves in how do we engineer our way through that. It's got to go beyond just the people and process, but building out advance mechanisms for us to identify trends and signals. So that's what's happening across the ecosystem and then be able to respond appropriately really quickly, all with the one goal, which is ensuring we have the availability and resiliency for our clients to support their needs from a financial perspective. Keith And so, you know, for us having that core of always being available, always being up, it's a constant challenge for us to be able to look through that data and solve complicated and complex problems through code. And that's the mechanism we continue to push for it on. Adam Keith, you just said always up, always available. I knocked on wood here in the office to make sure you didn't jinx us. Yeah, I'll. Keith Do the same. Adam Yeah. You know, I just wanna make sure we just didn't go down all of a sudden, as you said that. But, you know, when I. When I think about that and you and you talk about, “hey, we have to figure out how to always be up. We have to figure out how to do this.” And, you know, obviously efficiencies and automation, all that kind of factors into it. Adam You know, one of the topics that that our listeners tend to enjoy and that's super high right now, and valuable is is AI.. So I'm curious, where does it fit into your world and through your discussions of achieving all this for the firm and for our clients and our customers? Keith Yeah, this is something that both Alicia and I, we spend a lot of time thinking about, and there's a partnership, but we're also looking at a different lens, right? So for me, I look at it from a bottom up perspective. For each application, you're going to get signals and information that's coming through with you. And we have lots of applications across our ecosystem, but each of them be able to detect what is normal and then when you hit above thresholds of different anomalies and so forth, how do we detect that and then correlate to action? Keith Right. The goal here for all of this is we're going to know things are going to happen, things are going to happen on the infrastructure. Things are going to happen with respect to the ecosystem. The applications themselves. Our job is to understand how do we pinpoint those signals back to automations and playbooks, to be able to drive actions. Keith Hopefully without human involvement. Like that's the goal. And all this along the way, though, there's a lot of great capabilities that our CSP providers are are enabling as well. So how do we tap into those, adopt them and governance and control them so we all can benefit from that and and capabilities that we could build, but also leverage with our cloud providers. Adam I love that call out there that you can build, but you can also consume from some of these providers. And I think some companies are very much in the build or only in the consumption, and it feels like there's a good model in between somewhere there. So that's amazing you’re all thinking about that full landscape that is offered to us. Adam Alicia, I just want to go to you real quick too, because I know Keith mentioned like that you all are working together. So how does your world and kind of what you're working on fit together with the whole AI landscape as well? Like it's so big! Alicia Absolutely, Yes. So Keith mentioned the observability and taking all the insights. And we do have them coming in from all these signals, from whether it's a service provider or internal platforms. So our team is working really closely on that from a data aspect of what are the insights we're seeing, what can we predict inside of the organization when we think about incidents or changes that are occurring and how can we be more proactive? Alicia Again, as he said, at the end of the day, it's it's all about the customer and user experience and making sure that we can understand and know what those trends are. And then from I think from just diagnosing something as well where we're taking those observability actions and how we can do performance analysis, we're doing those anomaly detections from a network perspective and bringing in a whole landscape of new data from network server and storage inside of our infrastructure. Adam Amazing, amazing. Maureen So, Alicia, if I build on what you've just been talking about with with Adam here and on what Keith said, as we take a look at this in the speed of which, you know, we don't want our customers telling us about our problems, right, Which is a lot of what you all are doing, right? Looking for patterns, looking for things, and then being able to, you know, predict, be able to change what we do, be able to automate it and, you know, get to the place where we actually know and we're preventing our customers don't even see it. Maureen Right. Whether it's a third-party provider or an internal platform. So, for all of that, then we bring it back to, if we're talking about that involves talent. And so, we'd like to move into that a little bit and just talk about, you know, how do you how do you and Keith, how to in this space, given the importance of it and given the opportunity. Maureen Right, the strategic opportunity that we have ahead of us, you know, how do you think about talent in this space? Alicia Yeah. So, you know, we talked about the technology, the breadth and depth that we have here at Fidelity. It takes a wide range of skills. We're constantly looking for people in an operations space who who've got that. There's a great opportunity here in enterprise operations as we so we have the unique perspective of what we're able to see across the entire landscape in the enterprise and engage with every piece of technology and teams from a skills and tooling. Alicia And so there's there's great upskilling that's happening today as technology changes and the innovation happens, but then also career mobility. So we're we're continuing to evolve and make sure that our internal talent is continuing to grow, but then also making sure that we're bringing in new talent, new ideas along the way. So those AI skills, understanding the data analytics pieces and bringing those in from an operations perspective, that's definitely what's happening for us too, here in the world of Fidelity. Alicia And what I've learned is the pace at which we move. When you think about the trade and how fast it is and what we're able to support, it's microseconds. It can be very, very complex. And the amount of systems that this touches from a trading platform. So being able to operate at a very, very fast pace and having that inside of your talent pool. Maureen that's great. Maureen And if I just play on that a little bit and the curiosity, the willingness to continue to learn and evolve their skills and I know you've mentioned to us before, so I think it's something, you know, if there's anything else you want to add there, right, because it is all about growth. It's about that, you know, personal development as well as things evolve there. Maureen So either you or and or Keith, if you want to add anything there around how you're view in that talent and you know what are what are the kinds of qualities. Keith Yeah. You know, I'll add to it a few key areas that we look at and who does well here, right? Like, what is the type of person that comes in here and actually excels? It's to Alicia’s point, someone who is comfortable with change. Right? And the problems we have are super wicked complex. These aren't easy ones. And so for us, you know, we're people who gravitate towards those really hard problems. Keith You know, there's those opportunities here. There's those opportunities that dig down deep on analyzing information, determining different theories, and then building practices to try out and be able to go and learn as we go. Right. You can't Google some of the stuff that we're talking about here. These are very unique components with the expectation of performance and latency and availability that there's no way to be able to just pull that out. Keith And so for people who who want to come here and make a difference by learning and building upon those skills and then trying out different components and then scaling. Right. Part of the challenge for us, we're very large enterprise, lots of different opportunities to make little improvements. And then as as I've talked to you many times, we're about amplify it across, right? Keith And so people who are comfortable with sharing, listening to each other, being able to build upon each others where there's little pieces that we all can actually do together in order for us to collaborate and drive something that we all benefit from. So people that who want to work in that open, collaborative technical space, you know, you have many, many opportunities come in here and make a difference. Keith And what's great about it, it's becomes a motivation for the individuals where they see it. Hey, I did that, you know, even today I had a monthly operation review with the team and and one of the coolest moments was someone says, hey, not only are we sharing this with you, you know, the whole team feels the success of this. Keith They feel it, they see it, and they actually drive the change to motivate them to do the next step and the next step in the next step. And so that those are the people in particular that we see do well and really connect well across the ecosystem. Adam So, Keith, Alicia, you all have some great answers. You obviously came very prepared today, so don't feel bad. Put you on the spot with this next one with a harder question. So forgive me, but you feel like you're on top of your game. So I'll ask you the hard question. The new next. You're talking about this emerging tech. Adam You're talking about AI, you're talking about people who like hard problems, you're talking about people that are trying to evolve spaces, which means evolving themselves. Like that's hard stuff for all of us as humans to do and to go after. So, what's top of mind for you? What's that new next? Like if your teams are evolving both in their learnings and technologies or there are things they are going after, what is that new Adam Next thing that is, is that hard thing for us to tackle as a company for those technologist to really dive into? So, I'll just open that up and see where you all go. Alicia Yeah, that's a great question. Adam. So we're continuing not only to want to challenge ourselves and our employees, but I think it's to make the best customer experience possible. So for us internally inside of our team, it's, it's really focused on that customer user experience, making sure we understand end to end across the entire enterprise with the amount of systems and services and products that we provide to our customers and the complexity of those making sure that that we understand that when you click this thing or this piece of technology or this piece moves or the the client requests something that we fully understand from a landscape perspective, what happens across our ecosystem and how Alicia do we how do we make sure that that we're providing the best service possible? Keith Yeah. And with that, you know, some of the foundational components that I think of with respect to it, we've been talking about data a lot, right? And so, you know, being social with Cloud and SRE for a while, I love data, right? The hard part is driving the insights. And so with a lot of the work that Alicia’s team is driving with cluster analysis, signal detection and so forth, that allows us to have theories. Keith Right? The idea and the effort now is taking those theories and then building them practices both from a proactive and a reactive basis. So as we have all the signal, whether it's metrics, whether it's tracing, whether it's different real user measurements, and then synthetics, awesome. This gives you a trigger, but then what do you actually pull on the other end of it? Keith And for us, with our complexity, our systems aren't isolated to themselves. There's there's no little box associated with, you know, how do I log into our mobile app or how do I execute a trade? There are a number of microservices and so the chain, the value chain, and be able to do orchestration across many different boxes and bring it together to achieve what Alisha mentioned of the customer experience and availability. Keith Like, that's what's fun. That's what keeps me motivated. And each day we learn a little bit more. We learn a little bit more with respect to what's happening across the ecosystem, what signals we're getting from our cloud and service providers themselves, and then how do we stitch all that together to solve this really complicated challenge and problem and so forth? Keith So that's what keeps me every day excited to come in and see what the day brings. Adam I look, I'm as both an associate here and as a customer of Fidelity. I'm glad y'all are out there doing that because that's complex and hard. So I'm glad somebody is watching all of that and figuring out how to continue to evolve this space. Kudos to you all. That's amazing. Maureen So so thanks for that. And is as we as we talk further here, one of the things that might be great to get into, if there's anything else you want to say on talent, what you're looking for, the continuous learning change, right? Connectedness of the ecosystem right now. Taking a look at I like how you said value chain right? Maureen You know, the customer value chain, the internal processes, things of that nature. You know, one of the things that's interesting for Adam and I, while Adam hasn't been here that long either, you know, but I think, you know, if you're here five years or less or, you know, maybe in Fidelity, people say, you know, if you're haven't been here for ten years, you're still a baby. Maureen But you know, since you did come to Fidelity over the last couple of years, and as we think about the war on talent and, you know, trying to, you know, build talent from our college graduates, you know, bring in folks from, you know, we have several programs, you know, like the resume, people who may have taken some time off, you know, So we have several programs internally, but let's just talk about, you know, when you came here, what was your mindset? Maureen What did you hear and what have you found since you've been here? You know, what sets you know, does Fidelity set itself apart? And, you know, how would you how would you discuss that? Alicia Yes, I'd love to talk about that, Maureen, just being fairly new to the organization, as you said. So, when I think about just through the interview process and what drew me to Fidelity, and it was really that culture as as I went through the interview process every single person I talked to was just incredibly passionate about the company and what they do and the services that they provide after coming inside to Fidelity. Alicia And you can see it is evident in everything we do. We're a customer first mentality and it's not just on the outside, It's not just how we we post on a website. We talk about it. Besides the culture and the technology that we have, I think it's a fantastic combination and it we have a platform that's very, very unique and an opportunity to continue to grow skills for yourselves and your employees. Alicia It's been it's been just fantastic. We don't settle in this organization. We continue to push ourselves and and make sure that we've got the best experience. Maureen I think that's great. So thank you. You touched on, you know, several different areas and, you know, love to hear from your perspective, you know, because there's always, you know, a different lens that you be able And we always say we appreciate new eyes, right? Maureen Like coming in and seeing the same processes, the same the same ways of doing business. You have new eyes, you know, how can we change? How can we continue to get better. Keith, anything you add to this conversation? Keith I think Alicia hits a big part of it. You know, for me, there's kind of a few different categories that are really important to me of where I work. I get a chance to work with consulting organizations, software company as large enterprises, and Fidelity was the only one that hits three different buckets that I care about. One is the tech focused and the fact that we are constantly building and driving forward with technology. Keith For me, for being a technologist for 25 years, it's it's a lifeblood and I love it and I love to stay current and be part of a company pushing the innovation forward. Number two and number three. You're just as important, though. Two, the people I get to work with. I do better when I have people I trust and I like and I want to be part of. Keith And, you know, I have a distinct pleasure to work with these awesome individuals on this podcast and many others. You know, that means a lot to me, you know, because we spend so much time working and partnering together in order for us to accomplish the same goal and to have people, you know, you trust and you like is really important. Keith Since we do spend the time doing this. Last, it kind of goes into what Alicia mentions, which is the culture aspect of it, and having a purpose or an ethos of why you're there is also important to me to like, we realize how important this is for all the different people that rely on us for their financial health and having that as part of the core and why you show up and why you swarm and do different things during different events, you know, that also is really important to me. Keith So I know why I'm showing up every day. It's not just for for an individual component, but but for really just making sure you could try to do a difference in the lives of people. And so those three things are super hard to find. And Fidelity is my home because it has those three things. And I love showing up and I love the people I get a chance to work with. Keith I should just said Maureen. I could have said, because. Adam That's all of our answers, because of Maureen. Maureen Ta-da. Adam In on that happy note, you know, we're coming close to the end of our time. So we want to make sure we we have a little bit of a personal chat as well, a fun fact time. So I'm going to I'm going to ask both of you to share a fun fact about yourself, maybe something that would surprise our listeners, maybe some of the surprise, your coworkers, something that we don't know about you, Maureen. Adam I've never heard about you. So, Alicia, why don't you start? Surprise us. Alicia All right, Fun fact. So I grew up in the West Coast, and I'm an avid snowboarder, so I spent, I spent much of my youth and in the California Sierra Nevada mountains growing up and so I do love to get out and enjoy some snow. Have not been out yet this year. We just got some some great snow. Alicia I know in the Colorados. But for me personally as well, I'm incredibly passionate about and so especially around women in technology. So I'm avid in the local DFW working closely with several partners and continuing to grow the women in technology. Maureen Dallas, Fort Worth, DFW? Alicia Yeah, Yeah. Maureen Awesome. Thanks. Adam Yeah. The snowboarding thing, I didn't know you grew up on the West Coast, didn't know you were avid snowboarder. So amazing in your your passion for D&I and working locally that I actually did know but I was surprised by the others. Keith, tell us something fun about you. Keith Yeah. So so for me I'm part of that pickleball craze that's going on in the country. Hum, I love it. I know it sounds weird and so forth, but it is such a fun time. And every Thursday there is a bunch of us that we go out and play. And so anyone close North Carolina and once to pick up a game and talk a little about Fidelity, you know, you know, I'm here and so forth, you know, other things. Keith You know, I have three awesome kids and my son is at university, USC studying comp-sci and math and and, you know, I was lucky to be asked as a friend of mine to actually go and be a guest lecturer at a computer science program later this this spring. So, I'm super excited to go in and and see the energy and tell the story of how awesome being in technology is as a career. Keith I've loved it for the last 25 years. And and to Alicia’s point, you know, how do we share that with others so people can feel connected to this as as a really interesting and fun career for them? Adam Awesome. Amazing. I've yet to try pickleball. Maureen, have you tried pickleball yet? Maureen I have not tried pickleball. Keith We can do it! Honestly, the four of us, we got it. You just tell me when Adam. Adam Maureen and I are out of the loop. Maureen I’m a leftie too. I don't know if that's good or not. Keith I think it'll be great. I think you'll be very well. Adam You know, Alicia, Keith, I want to thank you. And Green. We want to thank you for making the time. It sounds like you were really busy, both on keeping things running and predicting what might go wrong and thinking about the future. So we're glad you could make the time today for us and for our listeners. Maureen Agreed. Thanks so much. Keith Yeah, thanks for having us. Alicia Thank you. Adam Thanks for joining us for Tech on Deck. We hope you enjoyed the episode. If you haven't yet, please give us a five-star rating and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from. Maureen Thank you to our listeners and recording studio and editors who make our episodes possible to learn more about tech opportunities, head over to Tech Dot Fidelity Careers Dot com. Adam See you next time.