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Extract from Deloitte (Tom Davenport)
Case study 2: Building an analytical talent ecosystem at Principal
Principal Financial Group, based in Des Moines, Iowa, offers insurance, retirement, and asset management products. Recruiting data scientists and AI specialists is difficult anywhere, and especially away from hotspots such as the Bay Area, Boston, and New York; so Joseph Byrum, the company’s chief data scientist, has been forced to be creative about building a talent ecosystem. In addition to hiring data scientists, he’s explored crowdsourcing and close relationships with university analytics programs.
Over the course of his career, Byrum has worked with thousands of crowdsourcing projects, and he strongly believes that they generally yield more innovative solutions than working with internal domain experts. He works with several different crowdsourcing firms. In addition to crowdsourcing, Byrum and Principal also rely heavily on an even less common talent source—student capstone projects in analytically oriented programs at universities. There are now hundreds of such programs in the United States alone,11 and many of them have “capstone” programs in which students are expected to work on real business problems with corporate sponsors. Byrum has set up over 60 capstone projects at a variety of universities—many involving important problems for Principal to solve.
Of course, Principal does need to hire some internal people as well to help develop AI and analytics solutions, and Byrum has thus far built a team of about 20. He hires often through the capstone projects, which Byrum finds much more useful than interviews. He says that the staff that he does hire are a little different than most data science types in other companies—they have quant skills, but also design thinking and systems engineering skills. He also puts a strong emphasis on their ability to communicate and collaborate and uses psychological profiles to ensure that members of his team complement each other.
Joseph Byrum is an accomplished executive leader, innovator, and cross-domain strategist with a proven track record of success across multiple industries. With a diverse background spanning biotech, finance, and data science, he has earned over 50 patents that have collectively generated more than $1 billion in revenue. Dr. Byrum’s groundbreaking contributions have been recognized with prestigious honors, including the INFORMS Franz Edelman Prize and the ANA Genius Award. His vision of the “intelligent enterprise” blends his scientific expertise with business acumen to help Fortune 500 companies transform their operations through his signature approach: “Unlearn, Transform, Reinvent.” Dr. Byrum earned a PhD in genetics from Iowa State University and an MBA from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.
