Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Genworth Financial has used ALM tools from HP to Break Down Silos.

1. Discover Case Study: Genworth Financial Improves
Application Delivery, Using Executive Scorecard for Greater
Visibility
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Genworth Financial has used ALM tools from
HP to break down silos.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor:
HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you
from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the
Discover show floor this week, the week of June 6, to explore some major
enterprise IT solution trends and innovations making news across HP’s
ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your
host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Discover live discussions.
[Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
We're here now with a representative of Genworth Financial. We're going to talk about the
transition from a number of different products used to improve application delivery, performance
testing, and also operational integrity. Then, the transition to a more comprehensive role for
those, working in concert, and eventually with the opportunity to have an Executive Scorecard
view into operations vis-à-vis these products and solutions.
We're here to talk about Genworth Financial’s experience with Tim Perry. He is the Chief
Technology Officer for the Retirement and Protection Division at Genworth Financial in
Richmond, Virginia. Welcome to the show, Tim.
Tim Perry: Thanks. Good to be here.
Gardner: Tell me about what’s your stock in trade? What is Genworth Financial and why is
technology so important to you?
Perry: Genworth Financial is an insurance company that covers many different areas like life
insurance, long-term care insurance, mortgage insurance, wealth management, and things like
that, and we're here for a number of reasons. We use HP for helping us just maintain and keep a
lot of our applications alive.
Gardner: Could you give us a sense of your operations, the scope of your IT organization?

2. Perry: Our IT organization is, depending on the division, hundreds of employees, but then we
also have contractors that work internationally on our behalf as well. So, throughout the world,
we’ve got developers in different places.
Gardner: How about some metrics around the number or types of applications that you're
using?
Perry: We have a gazillion applications, like every big company has, but for our division alone,
we have around 50 applications that are financially important, and we track them more than any
of the others. So that gives you a feel for the number of applications. There are a lot of small
ones, but 50 big ones.
Gardner: Let’s take a tour through the way in which you are using HP products, you’ve got
ALM, PPM, Performance Monitoring, and BSM. Give me some perspective on what you are
doing with these HP products?
Requirements management
Perry: Let me start with a little bit of a roadmap. We brought in Quality Center, way back
before ALM. We brought that in mainly for requirements management and
for testing. That one has evolved over the years to the point where we
really wanted to get traceability for developers, testers, business analysts,
everything. That’s what we're hoping for in the ALM stack of things on its
own.
PPM came in for a lot of different reasons. Project Portfolio Management
was a piece of it. We had a very raw portfolio of what we are working on.
Since then it’s become a service request management within our division,
much like what you do with the helpdesk, but for our division in
applications, everything from account request to marketing, workflow
approvals, things like that. So PPM has taken on life of its own.
The newest one is performance engineering, and performance engineering to us means
performance monitoring and performance testing, and we’ve had performance testing for a while
but we’ve not been great at monitoring and keeping track of our applications as they are living
and breathing.
Those are the three big silos for us, and I just want to mention that’s the reason this Performance
Suite that we are about to talk about is intriguing to us because it starts to glue all of this
together.
Gardner: On June 1, HP announced its IT Performance Suite, and a number of people are taking
a really deep look at it here at Discover. Tell me what your initial perceptions are and what your
potential plans are?

3. Perry: Just like our own internal applications, it felt as if up until now a lot of these suites that
HP provides stood on their own and didn't have a lot of integration with each other. What I am
starting to see is a lot of synergy around good integrations. The Executive Scorecard is probably
the epitome of it, the top of it, that talks to these executives about where things are, the health of
the applications, how we're doing on projects, all those things that are the key performance
indicators that we live and breathe.
That’s cool, but in order to get the scorecard, that implies data is available to the scorecard and
integrations are there in place. That combination is the magic we're looking for.
Gardner: And how about the KPIs? That would bring some standardization and allow you to be
able to start doing apples-to-apples comparisons and getting a stronger bead on what is the
reality of your IT and therefore, how you can improve on it.
Important indicators
Perry: It appears that HP has looked at 170 or so KPIs that the industry, not just HP, but
everybody, has said are important indicators. We can pick and choose which ones
are important to us to put them on the scorecard. Those are the ones that we can
focus on from an integration standpoint. It’s not like we have to conquer world
hunger all at once.
Gardner: I’ve heard folks say that the scorecard is of interest, not just for IT,
but to bring a view of what’s going on in IT to the business leadership and the
financial leadership in the organization, and therefore, make IT more integral rather
than mysterious.
Perry: I have to say this. Our IT organization is part of operations. Last year, at this same event,
we had more operations folks here than IT. I think HP should take the IT moniker off and start
talking more about "business operations." That’s just my personal view of this, and I agree, this
helps us not just roll up information to IT executives, but to our actual operations folks.
Gardner: Do you have any sense of what the integration and the continued evolution of a
lifecycle approach to IT and quality has done for you? Do you have any metrics of success,
either from a business value perspective or just good old speeds-and-feeds and cost perspective?
Perry: Without having actual numbers in front of me, it’s hard to quantify. But let’s just say this,
with Quality Center in particular, it’s helped us a lot with traceability between the business
requirements and the actual testing that we are doing. I don’t know how to measure it here, but
it’s been a big thing for us. The piece that's missing right now is the developer integration, and
we just saw a lot of that this week. I'm looking forward to evolving that even more. That’s been a
big deal.

4. Gardner: Perhaps if I ask you that same question a year from now, at Discover 2012, you’ll
have some hard numbers in metrics, right?
Perry: Oh, shoot. I’d love to be able to go and have a presentation at one of the sessions that
we’ve had such great experience with Performance Suite. I’ll be here talking a lot about it. I’d
love to do that.
Gardner: Okay, great. We’ve been talking about how IT performance measurement and
application lifecycle management improvements are coming together for a "whole greater than
the sum of the parts" and looking forward to more of a scorecard and performance metrics
viewpoint and comparison capability in the near future.
We’ve been talking with Tim Perry. He is the Chief Technology Officer for the Retirement and
Protection Division at Genworth Financial. Thank you, Tim.
Perry: It’s good to be here, and thank you.
Gardner: And I’d like to thank our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast
coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of user experience discussions. Thanks
again for listening and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor:
HP
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how Genworth Financial has used ALM tools from
HP to Break Down Silos. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.
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