Shawn Lawson, Vice President of Security Infrastructure and IT, Edelman Financial Engines
Can you walk us through your key roles and responsibilities?
My days and nights in this role are spent planning, strategizing and reviewing projects and project roadmaps to analyze the success of our business goals and stakeholder engagement. It is typically completed by an organization’s business and technical teams. The process also includes working with our business stakeholders to understand their needs and manage relationships.
In addition, I handle operational upgrades by managing our solutions and their vendors. Staying informed of factors both internal and external to the business that may impact our strategy and roadmap is another important part of my role.
What are the outstanding challenges in today’s market?
The most prominent challenge is prioritizing the company’s resources and its needs in a balanced way. Given limited budgets and workforces in current market conditions, companies need to effectively prioritize their operations to efficiently utilize their resources.
Often, people spend too much time obsessing over details and complexities and not enough time dealing with the issues that cause those complexities. They must prioritize time to improve operational resiliency and efficiency to address the underlying issues plaguing them.
How do leaders respond to changes in IT infrastructure?
Leaders should strive to understand the needs of business stakeholders, the capabilities and capabilities of current technology. This understanding helps them identify opportunities where technology can advance stakeholder goals. Stakeholder engagement can be accelerated through the use of specialized organizational applications, analytics and artificial intelligence tools.
Leveraging artificial intelligence in job roles may reduce the gap between what people with longer and shorter work experience can achieve in similar roles. 
Additionally, a company’s key performance indicators (KPIs) should reflect the impact of technology-driven solutions on its business goals. It should be a value-based metric, not an operational IT metric.
In what different ways is artificial intelligence revolutionizing the financial planning industry?
Artificial intelligence is relevant to every industry, and financial services are no exception. In the future, artificial intelligence will replace many job roles and increase productivity. This includes tasks that would have taken days if done manually, such as analyzing and building content, which can now be reduced to just a few hours. Leveraging artificial intelligence in job roles may reduce the gap between what people with longer and shorter work experience can achieve in similar roles.
Our organization is applying artificial intelligence to our services, and our current focus is on technology operations and improving resiliency without expanding our team.
What advice do you have for your peers and those new to the industry?
Effective allocation of time and resources is critical to solving problems. It puts you in a better position and makes you more adept at dealing with the new challenges that are constantly emerging in today’s volatile markets. Understanding your business and priorities, and being able to focus your resources there, is critical to the success of your business.
