Innovation comes down to people

“Everybody can have a similar strategy, incorporating cloud, artificial intelligence, focusing on speed and scale,” says Lori Beer, global chief information officer (CIO) at JPMorgan Chase. The difference, she adds, is “how you execute that strategy, and that comes down to people and the discipline you have around execution”.

People, talent and teamwork lie at the core of Ms Beer’s strategy around innovation and delivering projects at scale. She manages a $14bn budget and employs more than 55,000 technologists globally across the bank. 

Recently, JPMorgan announced plans to hire an additional 2000 engineers worldwide by the end of the year. The bank has already added more than 5000 software developers and data scientists in the past year. Staff working in technology comprise about 20% of the bank’s roughly 278,000-strong global workforce. The new roles will encompass general software engineering, data science, cyber security and cloud computing, among other areas.

“Part of my responsibility is making sure the global technology leadership team is constantly balancing what’s the right thing for our customers and clients; what’s the right thing for the firm; [and] how do we distribute resource allocation, making sure overall we’re thinking about the firm,” she says. 

Starting strong

That responsibility manifests itself in the form of personal touchpoints, with weekly meetings with the global technology leadership team, and monthly get-togethers with the managing directors, technology centre leadership and distinguished engineers across the bank on key topics relative to the execution of JPMorgan’s strategy.

However, Ms Beer carves out special time to meet with new software engineering professionals who have just graduated. She says these meetings are a great way to find out what is on new recruits’ minds, how the bank is training them and what else they and the bank need to think about. 

In addition to welcoming new tech talent to the bank, Ms Beer is also committed to improving the rates of diversity in the talent pool. “We want to hold ourselves to a standard of having a diverse, equitable, inclusive environment,” she says. “But as you can imagine, across the globe, the availability of diverse talent and technology is a small pool.”

In order to increase the size of that pool, Ms Beer is spearheading a series of strategies aimed at the technology talent pipeline, including local apprenticeship programmes that bring in interns just finishing high school. The bank also looks to sponsor apprenticeships that allow people to work while attending university, which opens up the talent pool to people who may not traditionally have come up via the university system. 

“We are a big employer of tech talent here and across the globe, so we also try to make sure we’re investing in the community and the pipeline of talent,” she adds. 

Forward march

In addition to recruiting diverse talent, Ms Beer says the bank runs a series of development programmes, such as Take IT Forward, which look to retain and promote women and under-represented populations, preparing them for leadership roles.

“Take IT Forward has really grown,” she says. “We have cohorts that come together, they talk about issues, [and] we try to make sure we do the right training and development.”

The bank looks to measure the success of initiatives like Take IT Forward by comparing rates of promotion with staff who have gone through the senior leadership programme.

“We also do a lot of work with our manager. A lot of times it’s your manager who is the first line of really understanding how to build a diverse and inclusive environment,” she says. 

High-level recognition

Although Ms Beer has championed diverse tech talent for most of her career, she feels JPMorgan has done “a great job” of making an inclusive and diverse environment a priority.

“Especially now, and especially with tech, you get closer and closer to building the products and services that our customers and clients use,” she adds. “Having a [tech team] population that more represents what that population looks like is critical.”

Ms Beer, along with her husband, Bill, launched a scholarship for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students at the University of Dayton, where she earned her bachelor of science degree in computer science. They also started a $500,000 endowed scholarship at the University of Cincinnati for students pursuing STEM careers, especially women, at the university’s Lindner College of Business. This year, Ms Beer’s alma mater awarded her an honorary doctorate of science and the University of Cincinnati awarded her a doctorate of commercial science, honoris causa.

As the global CIO at one of the largest banks in the world, most of Ms Beer’s day-to-day job involves what many other banks are examining: increasing the use of cloud technologies to enable speed and agility in a safe and secure environment, building on the use of blockchain and distributed ledger technology, and devoting time and resources to discovering the future of quantum computing. 

However, Ms Beer’s “incredible passion” remains broadening the representation of talent and technology, and she wishes she could spend even more time mentoring and developing new talent in this space.