Paul Beswick on centralization vs decentralization
From Marsh McLennan’s CIO Paul Beswick on fostering IT velocity · · TECHtalk
“One of the most difficult things in my role is the balancing act: walking that tightrope between driving enough consistency and coordination to get better results and not ending up driving business strategy inappropriately through the back door.”
On , Paul Beswick, SVP, Chief Information & Operations Officer at Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc, spoke about centralization vs decentralization during Marsh McLennan’s CIO Paul Beswick on fostering IT velocity on TECHtalk.
About Paul Beswick
In a May 2022 interview, Paul Beswick, Senior Vice President and Chief Information & Operations Officer at Marsh McLennan, discussed his approach to increasing IT velocity. He described his primary responsibility as "to raise the speed limit of the business as a whole and to find ways to ungum what can often be slow bureaucratic processes." Beswick stated that the organization aims to "conceive a project on Monday and get it into production on Friday of the same week." He noted that the company's strategic deployment platform, OSS2, is "fundamentally Kubernetes-based" and uses GitHub, with automated deployment pipelines. Beswick also described a "golden path" approach where following a defined process allows incremental improvements. Beswick addressed several organizational and technical strategies. He said he has "increasingly been coming to the view that applications are a problem in terms of the way that they shape how IT organizations work." He mentioned that as part of a policy council, the company consolidated ten information security documents totaling 130 pages into one 33-page document. Beswick discussed efforts to create a virtualized data layer over existing databases to avoid creating new data stores for each mashup. He also noted that the pandemic "made IT's unseen work visible" and boosted the credibility of IT teams. Beswick described a challenge in his role as "walking that tightrope between driving enough consistency and coordination to get better results and not ending up driving business strategy inappropriately through the back door."