Resiliency in a Complex Tech Environment

Maureen Welcome to Tech on Deck podcast brought to you by Fidelity Investments. I'm your host, Maureen Olejarz, Domain Leader software Engineering and. Adam Adam Ely, Chief Information Security Officer. 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, Chief Information Security Officer at Fidelity. We have an amazing episode for you all today. Our guest, Tammy Gilbert, who's a domain leader for enterprise infrastructure and operations here at Fidelity. Tammy has been with the firm over seven years. It's made a huge impact since joining and currently leads over 2200 people, I think, all of whom have a diverse role under her function. Adam Tammy really can't wait to dive in. Hear more about your career and what you're working on. Welcome to the show. Tammy Thank you. I'm excited to be here today. Adam All right. With that, I want to start by asking you what exactly is it that you do in your current role, your title, Domain Leader of Enterprise, Infrastructure and Operations. I mean, it sounds big, sounds huge. And I know from working with you, it touches a lot of parts of the business. You manage a team, a really large set of teams, but can you explain that to our listeners a little bit? Tammy Yeah, sure. I'd be glad to. So we're a shared services group across the enterprise here at Fidelity, and I would say there's really two main purposes. The first one is around our IT infrastructure group where we manage things like our networks, our data centers, mainframes, servers, storage, desktop environments. And yes, we still have a mainframe here. Unfortunately. Tammy And then the second purpose is to manage the I.T. operations. And in this role, we ensure the smooth operations of our I.T. environment and and this is doing things like building on our resiliency, managing our I.T. services like incidents and crisis management and things like that. We work very closely with our application team to raise the bar on resiliency and make sure that if anything does go wrong in our bump in the night, that we're kind of the first responders to ensure that the remediation goes smoothly and as quick as possible. Tammy We're also driving our IOPS practice with a strong focus on that resiliency that I mentioned and proactive remediation. So helping the organization think and build about things like self-healing capabilities into their applications. Adam So if I'm following if our listeners are following sounds like you and team go from working with our associates, our employees, laptops and end user computing environment all the way to engineers and data scientists working on some of the newest cutting edge technology. I mean, that's a that's quite the range. It's a pretty range, big range of things. Tammy Yeah, exactly. I mean, you have to be really good at context switching in our role. Our team does every single day. You know, we're going from it could be different from day to day. It could be different hour to hour in many cases. And we have to be able to quickly shift our focus to what's happening in the moment to ensure the highest level of of availability for our customers. Tammy So we're we're just basically a true seven by 24. Follow the sun organization with associates in U.S., India, Ireland, as well as several other international locations. But but while we're shifting our organization very quickly, we're also driving an enterprise solution for the company and a strategic direction. So things like lifecycle management, site reliability, engineering and AI ops program that I mentioned earlier are all key parts of it. Tammy So like I said, you've got to be able to context switch very quickly to, you know, between I'm working on a strategic initiative to, hey, there's a problem in the environment, go, help get that remediated quickly. Maureen So, Tammy, that's great. And as I've been listening to this and we could go in many directions, when you're working with a large and diverse team, with so many different capabilities, platforms, things of that nature. What's what do you see as one of your biggest challenges in managing that kind of diversity, both in team tech stacks platform and things of that nature? Tammy I would say it has to be making them all feel attached to a unified strategy. And in a team like ours where a lot of reactionary work is happening, like I said, something goes bump in the night, We immediately organize and bring together the team to work on it. But you still have to have that really strong vision and and prioritization in the organization. Tammy And so we spend a whole lot of time communicating to make sure people understand what that strategic direction is. And and so the leaders in the organization can make the right priority decisions in the day to day and in the moment as they as they do this context switching that I constantly talk about. Maureen So I think that's great. So as we take a look at that build on what you've just gone through and then talk about your strategy and plans as you head into 2024. Right. With the complexity of both the environments, the marketplace, all of all of the basic competing factors and the speed at which things are changing in the external world. Maureen Let's let's just talk a little bit about how that affects the work that your team is managing and how do you prepare and get them prepared for the future as technology continues to evolve. Tammy Yeah, and I have to say, I've been in the IT industry for many, many years. I won't tell you exactly how many because it truly dates me. But but I will say with confidence that today's technology environment is one of the most complex I have ever seen. There's an and there's a number of things that we do to try to keep people current in our associated teams focused on the right things. Tammy And the first one is the learning days that we've implemented in within Fidelity. And we give every single associate scheduled time to focus on keeping their skills current and expanding their knowledge. Secondly, for me, in 2024 and in fact this year and next year, you know, we're focused on changing the environment. The days of eyes on glass is long gone. Tammy The environment is just too complex to really be effective with that mode of operation. So we have to build resiliency into everything we do. And the problem is every company has that that's been around for a little bit has this legacy environment where resiliency was primarily handled by the hardware layers and now we're having to shift it into the software layers into the application layers. Tammy So this is a major focus for us with our site reliability engineering team, who work closely with the application teams to raise the bar in that space. And this really includes things like improved observability, being able to detect and shift away from the problem if it's possible, and ensuring redundancies is in every one of our critical solutions. Adam You mentioned resiliency and it's so interesting. I hear resiliency come up a lot when I'm talking to your team. Also, I'm talking to teams outside the company. So it's similar. It's a great focus, especially to your point that we're in such a complex technology environment that's got to get harder. You mentioned artificial intelligence, and one I'm kind of curious how the two might tie together, but AI is such a hot topic and there's so much potential to unlock there. Adam Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Tell us what your team is thinking, what they're doing with artificial intelligence. How does it drive towards those 24 goals for you? Tammy Yeah, Yeah. It is such a critical part of the strategy. Like I said, Eyes on glass is no longer something we can do. And if you think about it, Ai ops is the practice of combining big data machine learning into automation for the I.T operation processes, including things like event correlation, anomaly detection and causality, determination and where possible, taking the next step into self-healing as well. Tammy This helps us focus on the most important issues faster and resolving them for our customers faster as we grow. The number of applications we have is expanding. We're breaking big environments into microservices. There's just too many things to keep track, so you have to use ai ops and automation to point you in the right direction to get you where you need to be to help you remediate when possible. Tammy Otherwise, the humans that we have just can't do it. We would have to exponentially grow our our resources in order to keep up with the pace. And that's that's just not feasible to me. Adam As you as you talk about this resiliency, this super complex set of environments that companies have with technology today and this really look towards the future with AI and AI ops, I have to imagine your your group, your teams have some of the most interesting opportunities and work ahead of them. How do you how do you think about this, like vast and diverse set of opportunities and challenges and probably fun when you're thinking about hiring and staffing for these teams? Tammy Yeah, you know, and we will continue to hire your your traditional skills, things like infrastructure engineers like desktop storage engineers, mainframe engineers, servers, engineers. But we're also growing in the number of software engineers. Given the fact that so much of the infrastructure these days is really managed through software. We're also growing the number of data scientist data engineers as well as AI ops and site reliability engineers. Tammy That's kind of a a new term that has come into the industry over the last few years and really grown in its popularity because it's it's the individual that looks at it with this critical lie of resiliency and helps the application teams to think beyond just the scope of what they're doing. But looking at the end to end ecosystem to make sure that the entire ecosystem is reliable and constantly trying to heal itself. Tammy We're also hiring strong I.T. ops professionals who understand the I.T. service management, things like change, Internet problem processes. And those things are changing. So, you know, it's it's keeping those processes modern as your environment changes, You know, as we shift to cloud, as we go to microservices, those those processes have to change as well. And so we're looking for those individuals who can help us continue to transform those kinds of processes as well. Maureen So if I come in here and just build on everything that you and Adama have been talking about, Tami related to skills and, and people that you're hiring and that diverse set of, of technology, right. Those old days of just taking tickets and you go away and it's you know real strict layers of operations right then off to applications teams but you're you're having to hire the same kinds of skills that you would need in all of our application and platform teams, which is really a significant difference. Maureen And when I think about as we look at the number of people who are applying to Fidelity right over, you know, globally, and do you have any advice for people on either how to how to either get noticed, how to get your foot in the door? You know, do you want to talk about you talked about learning day earlier, but I think there's some other constructs that we have. Maureen I'd love to get your advice there for our audience. Tammy Sure. And, you know, first off, I think it's fantastic that we have so many people looking to try to join Fidelity. It just speaks to the to the company that we are and, you know, just the culture that we have fit that and it resonates with the folks that are out there looking for their next step in life. Tammy But yeah, some advice I would give them is a couple of things. First off, networking. Do not underestimate the networking capabilities. You know, grow your network, grow. You know, if you've got a LinkedIn profile, grow that network and look for where you have internal contacts within the company that can help you get noticed and get your resume pulled out of the, you know, the big stack of resumes that come in every day, number one. Tammy Number two, I would say, right. Write your resumé for the role that you're after. Don't just generic size your resumé. I see a lot of resume. And it's just this line list of here's all the great things I've done that may or may not get you to stand out in in a in a sea of resumes. So you have to write it for the role that you're after. Tammy This is a piece of advice that I was given when I was looking for my first CIO role. Actually, it was great advice because I had a recruiter look at my resume and say, This is an impressive resume, but I have no idea what you're after. So I had to quickly reform the resume and direct it to the role that I was after. Tammy And then the third thing is I would say be persistent. If you don't get your foot in the door with the first thing that you try, try, try again, Try several, you know, try to keep submitting it and make sure that, like I said, you're reaching into those contacts and trying to get someone to go help pull your resume out of the stack of resumes that we have. Maureen That are all electronic. Tammy Now, thankfully, all electronics. And guess what was probably machine learning. Yeah, reading that resume. That's why I say write it to the role that you're after so that maybe that's great advice. I can pull it out and get you into the interview process. Adam I love that advice. Writing the resume for the role that you're after, it kind of reminds me of your own advice just for the job that you want, but a different spin. I love that. Tammy, you know, talking about that, you talked a lot about your career. You talked a lot about your, you know, your resume. You've been in industry some number of years. Adam We won't pull on that. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to your current role, what your journey was like? I think as people are thinking about applying for those next roles, that will be interesting so they can see what a journey might look like for someone. Tammy Sure, yeah, I'd be glad to. So, you know, I started out in the actually in the hospital industry that quickly got into the airline industry working for American Airlines. And then I went on a series of spinouts, mergers, acquisitions and landed me at HP after a few years. And that included going to Saber and then going to EDS and then going to HP and and in all of that time and EDS and HP, it was really focused on large outsourcing of technology. Tammy That's where we would go in and take over a customer's environment and run that environment for them. And that could be anything from their data centers, their infrastructures, their application. We even did business process outsourcing for them in many cases. And that was great because I was able to get experience in and just a wealth of industries. I worked across seven different industries. Tammy Financial was one of them, but it included bakeries and mining and airlines and all kinds of different industries. So I got to got a great breadth across different industries and different approaches. Left HP in about 2012, joined a small company called Trinity Industries. They were a welding company. They made big things through welding. So things like railcars and barges and things like that. Tammy That was my first attempt at being a CIO, which was fantastic really, with the focus on just building a strategy out with them, which I did, and then was approached by Fidelity in late 2015 with an offer in 2016 to join on as their head of corporate technology group. This is a group that managed all the internal applications, things like we managed tax risk, compliance, audit, accounting, finance, HR Tammy Which is fantastic. It was in that role for about three years. And then my leader was my current leader. Roger Stiles, CTO for Fidelity new and we were having that, you know, okay, you been in your role for three years. Kind of what's next conversation we both agreed you know look I'm going to continue to broaden and do this because I've just really started this journey, really enjoyed it. Tammy But then I said, But if there's ever an opportunity, I would love to run the Enterprise Infrastructure Operations team. He kind of sat back and looked at me kind of funny. He's like, Why would you want to do that? That's like, you know, that's a whole different job. Lots of sleepless nights, long days, you know? And I said, Well, let me give you my resume, because I think you'll see that I have a large background in this space and I see some opportunities that I'd love to help transform. Tammy in that group. It was a full year later before an opportunity came up. He gives me a call and said, Hey, so remember that conversation? There might be an opportunity. Are you still interested? And I'm like, absolutely. So yeah, I took that, you know, a lot of interviews later, I was offered the the next role in my Fidelity career and and took this position, which is, by the way, I have to I have to do a call out for Fidelity on this. Tammy They are amazing at mobility which is, which is fantastic. It's you know, you could just get a lot of opportunity to take on different roles, new roles, learn different parts of the business. And and I have just been fortunate enough to have two particular roles that has given me a great enterprise wide view of Fidelity. It's given me kind of a crash course in how the company works, which has been really, really great for me. Adam And Maureen, you may not know this. I think Tammy and I figured out one time that we were both working with airlines at the same time on different side of the engagements, and we very likely were working on the same things at the same time with each other. Maureen Well, there you go. Now you're dating both. Tammy Of you, than you might think. Exactly. Maureen That's right. We could have you on for multiple episodes, believe me. Right. And it's been great sharing this. And the thing I'd always remind people is it's not just literally what you're stating, right, but it's right understanding those journeys. I mean, you were just talking about your first CIO role was at a welding company. Tammy Yes. Maureen Yeah. So so when I think about that, right, you know, just the the opportunities and it goes back to your resume about the kind of job that you'd want, the kind of experience that you're seeking. And it's so important. But anyway, it's really an impressive career journey. And, you know, I can tell how passionate you are about it. Maureen And, you know, obviously, you know, the in technology as a female in technology myself in the career, it'd be great to be able to just spend a few minutes with you on what's what have your experiences been. And then as you talk about that story as a woman in technology, what I just think that there's so many rich things that you could cover there. Maureen You know, maybe just share a few things with our with our folks here. Tammy And I'll go back to the very first time I was a vice president, newly promoted into the role. It wasn't the welding company. It was one of the prior companies that I mentioned. And we were having this large annual meeting of the top 200 leaders in the company. And I really had never even thought about this. But I walk into the room and it was a sea of men. Tammy There was literally three women in the room and that was it. Three women, three VP's in this company with a sea of about 197 men. So I guess that was the first time I really ever even noticed that there was this disparity between women and men in the organization. It never even occurred to me. It never really I never focused on it. Tammy Right, because I worked with lots of women, not but lots of those women were really not. As I began to reflect on it, we're really not in technology roles. They were in business analyst roles, project management roles, coordination roles. And I was I grew up as a hardcore technologist, so I started out as a network engineer and became an application software developer pretty quick. Tammy And so it was it was a stark reminder to me that this is a space that we all needed to work a lot harder in. I would say today you walk into a room and you can't you can't tell that there's a disparity, right? You know, I was easy. It's easy to count three. You can't. Yeah, women versus men or in a room anymore, which is, I think, great progress. Tammy But we're not where we need to be yet. It's an area that we need to continue to work. And I really think that the only way to make continued progress in this space is to really focus on young girls in school and encourage them into STEM programs, encourage them into technology fields and show them how exciting this world can be in this space. Tammy I think that's I think that's just such an important movement that all of us need to lean into. And it's not just a woman's moment. This is a man and a woman and everybody movement that needs to be engaged in it. Maureen Really helpful, really helpful as we think about that evolution and continuing to do that job right. And because even if you are a coordinator and you're a project manager and you're in I.T. jobs, right? Overall, that family of jobs I think is really important to encourage that as well, because you're going to have a range, a range of skills, a range of talents. Maureen And to your point, like where your careers go, your career may not take, you know, linear steps forward in one direction. It's really important to be open to the ways in which, you know, you can step step out a little bit to the side somewhere, but it could be something that you really learn. It could be the experience of the management, the industry, all of those things, you know, over the course of time that none of us wants to say how long we've been in the industry. Maureen But I think that's that's the richness of it, right? And that brings that diversity of thought, diversity of character, diversity of of experience to the table. Tammy Yeah. You know, I had I had to do a TED talk once and somebody was helping me to take a look at my resume. Maybe they're going to help me prepare for this tech talk, TED talk. And they said, I don't know if you've ever noticed it, but like a third of your your career was you moving up the ladder. Tammy A third of your career was moving down the ladder in a 30 year careers moving, you know, horizontal across the ladder. And I had never even realized it until she brought it up. Mean it's very true. It's you know, career paths are rarely a direct, straight path to get the experience that you need. You have to take a lot of different paths to where you need to go. Maureen Thanks. That was amazing. Adam So, Tammy, you just gave us some amazing advice on people's careers. You've talked a lot. That's really deep in how complex tech is these days and all the things that your team is doing. So let's get to know you a little bit, just more as a person outside your role, because we're all human beings. I think we all are all, talk to me, a little bit about some of your hobbies. Adam I mean, things you really enjoy. I saw some notes, some things that surprised me that I didn't know about you. So love those with with our audience today. Tammy Sure. So first off, I am an avid photographer. I love taking pictures, portraits. I do a little bit of weddings for people I know, lots of landscape type of things. So that's my favorite hobby and I spend a lot of time on that. An item that most people don't know about me, however, is that I'm also an avid Star Wars fan, and I don't mean just watching the nine, you know, the trilogy movies. Tammy I'm deeply immersed in Star Wars. I watch all the animated series The Clone Wars, and Asoka, Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Rebels, I read the books that that come out. I can pretty much tell you which your canon, which are not canon. And this is a love that my boys and I have three grown adults, a daughter and two boys, but three of the two boys and I spend a lot of time talking and waiting for the next series. Tammy And in theorizing on the backdrop of the storylines that are happening on Star Wars and then my daughter I have she has two, two children, so I have two grandchildren. And I love bonding with them and spending time with them. And we chase them all over the place, soccer games and rhythmic gymnastics and all kinds of things. They're so very active outside of Fidelity. Adam So this is this is amazing. I'm actually glad we really have this opportunity, you and I and I know you and Maureen, and maybe Maureen knew some of this and everybody's keeping it for me. But you and I talk a lot and I had no idea about the Star Wars interest or the photography. Both are really amazing to me. Adam I just didn't know it. So it's it's. Maureen Like that's as we talk shop too much. Tammy I normally when Adam an I are talking it's a problem. Maureen That's right. Tammy It's broke to fix it. Adam But I it's so true of me I you know, I want to thank you it was great to hear about your role, but really, really great to hear the advice you have for folks that might be applying or building their career now, as well as getting to know you. And and after the two and a half years we've worked together, I feel bad that I didn't know those things, but really wanted to thank you for taking time out of your very busy day to help us and help our listeners. Maureen Absolutely. Thanks, Tammy. Tammy My pleasure. Thank for having me, everyone. 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 opportunity, head over to Tech Dot Fidelity Careers Dot Com. Adam See you next time.