Marsh McLennan Headquarters in New York
Paul Beswick’s path to becoming Marsh McLennan’s chief information officer is non-traditional, to say the least. He joined the company through one of its operating companies: Oliver Wyman, which is a strategy consultancy. He rose through the ranks of that firm to become partner and global head of Oliver Wyman Labs and global co-head of Oliver Wyman’s digital practice. “This all happened because I went to the wrong meeting one day and got sucked into Marsh McLennan’s technology strategy design project with Scott Gilbert, who was my predecessor,” noted Beswick. “Then I got sucked into trying to implement it, which is something anyone who has been a consultant should know you should never do: you should never both write the strategy and take responsibility for implementing it .
When weighing the benefits of his background, he noted that he had been attending executive committee and board meetings since he was 20 years old. He also acknowledged that having P&L responsibilities in various roles throughout his rise at Oliver Wyman likely gives him a greater appreciation for the power of technology to increase Marsh McLennan’s revenue, and not just where it can lead to cost savings.
Beswick’s current role allows him to oversee technology for a conglomerate that includes Marsh, the world’s largest insurance broker, Mercer, a leader in human resources, employee benefits and investment advisory, Guy Carpenter, active in brokerage reassurance, as well as Oliver Wyman. When he took over as chief information officer about three years ago, the company was transitioning from a decentralized IT department to one that exerts much more influence from the center. “It’s a relatively new development in terms of how we’ve been organized. When I accepted this role, we were beginning the process of bringing together what had previously been business unit-specific technology organizations into one overarching organization,” Beswick said. “Before that, we had different teams per business, but with a shared security infrastructure and organization in the middle. It’s been an interesting journey trying to form a team from previously fairly independent teams.
Beswick sees his main task as increasing the speed of the business. “We’re doing a lot of work to understand what’s slowing us down, how we’re getting bogged down in our own processes, where there’s unnecessary bureaucracy, where we’re failing to find solutions to problems when we can design solutions that could help things move forward significantly. faster,” he stressed. “A lot of my time is spent trying to shift the effective boundary between speed, agility on the one hand, and security, compliance, robustness and resilience on the other.
Marsh McLennan, IT Director, Paul Beswick
For Beswick and his team, the main route to achieving this was to develop a platform strategy, develop a blueprint and agree on ‘templates’ that could be deployed easily, thereby streamlining policy, compliance and the non-functional aspects of each project undertaken by his organization. “One of the things I learned coming into this role is the importance of understanding certain organizational dynamics and the inefficient but stable balance points that exist in the organizational structure that tend to lock you into patterns ineffective. and thinking very deliberately about how you overcome some of these things,” he said.
Beswick is excited about the amount of innovation driven by technology and his team’s ability to convey the art of the possible to the rest of the company. He views technology as going from difficult to easy things. “We’re not in the game of doing really difficult things,” he said. “It’s not the organization we’re built to be, but hard things get easier over time, and there’s this constant shift from more complex and less accessible but powerful technology to things that are increasingly easier to get your hands on. At some point there is this tipping point where the difficult becomes easy. If we can be there at the point where things become easy and we understand how to implement them in a real business in the face of our real processes and our real problems, that’s the area where I think we can create the most valuable. This requires you to always be on the edge of that transition point and make sure you recognize when that transition is happening.
Marsh McLennan’s foray into generative artificial intelligence is a good example. It all started with partnering with vendor partners, but that proved too costly. However, when Microsoft made OpenAI backends securely available, Beswick and his team found that with a little extra engineering, they could make this available to the entire enterprise. The aim was to reflect the remarkable increase in ChatGPT usage in society. “I didn’t think we had to spend a lot of time worrying about use cases specifically,” Beswick admitted. “I had a feeling the use cases were going to emerge. Very quickly after having access to the [Microsoft OpenAI] API securely, we created the chat interface on top of it, which we call LenAI.
It took just a day and a half to deliver the first version to a pilot group within the company. The focus on transforming IT into a speed improvement engine is responsible for such a rapid path. Soon a few hundred people had access to LenAI and within 28 days the entire company had access. “I think we’ve identified about 300 distinct use cases that people have applied this to,” Beswick said. “Some are very specifically tied to a small part of the business. Others are more generic. We’ve been keeping an eye on that, capturing that information, and we’re using that to then drive our development program for some of the things that will be more scalable implementations of that.
Beswick believes his team progressed more quickly by reversing the usual process. Typically, people gather use cases, find a business co-sponsor, build a business case, put together a project team, and then get started. Given Beswick’s need for speed, it was too slow. “By going the other direction and launching something more generic and eliminating use cases, I think we moved faster,” Beswick said with pride. As a result, “we added a few more features to the basics, [such as] downloading research papers from the Internet. We work a lot with documents, so there’s a lot of things that people do with document summarization, with extracting data from documents and translating between languages, which these tools are great for. Email writing, especially for non-native English speakers when we are a business that operates largely in English [has been another powerful use case]. Many people use it to strengthen their communications and streamline things.
Writing code is another layer of value. Beswick enthusiastically noted that different parts of LenAI had been written by LenAI. This will increasingly become the norm. Additional features that have been removed include calculators, stock price searches, weather searches, database queries, and the ability to extract a variety of information sources. “There are clearly use cases where you can see a transformation of various processes that we would follow today that would be quite manual and where we could actually divert resources to much higher value work,” Beswick said. “These are starting to multiply. Much of this concerns things like ingesting, processing, and extracting data from documents. Cross-mapping data from one data source to another, from one data structure to another, also turns out to be a fairly tractable problem. I think we’re just scratching the surface of what this stuff will be.
Beswick and his team have made substantial progress in a short period of time, living up to its goal of becoming a force multiplier. He believes that he and his team are establishing a solid foundation, but that even higher levels of value will be achieved by building on that foundation.
Peter High is president of Métis strategy, a business and IT consulting firm. He has written three successful books, including his latest Arriving at Nimble. It also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.