Q&A with Eric Brickman

Executive Vice President
Global Technology and Digital Innovation

Question: Can you tell us more about your team?
Answer: Newport Group’s Global Technology & Digital Innovation team (TDI) consists of about 100 professionals that span the full breadth of technology and project management domains. TDI is made up of three primary verticals: 

Enterprise Project Management Office Software Development Information Technology

Q: What are TDI’s departmental mission and strategic objectives?
A: Our mission is to enable success through innovation and technology excellence. We strive to do this through a number of strategic objectives. Some objectives that might be of particular interest to our advisors and their clients include:
 

• Helping Newport Group achieve its risk management and security/privacy objectives
• Supporting Newport Group’s employees, clients and advisor partners with leading-edge IT/infrastructure
• Delivering the retirement and benefits industry’s premier digital user experience
• Enabling the firm’s departments to achieve their critical business objectives

Q: What’s TDI known for within the Industry? 
A:  We’re known for our award-winning digital user experience, Digital Client Access. It’s been recognized as one the industry’s leading digital solutions for participants and sponsors. We’re also known for our ability to integrate with any number of third party systems and deliver custom and private-labeled digital solutions. 

Q: What are some of TDI’s key strategic initiatives moving forward?
A: While we maintain very aggressive project schedules based on current business priorities, we also continue making progress across a suite of longer-term strategic initiatives. 

A few examples of TDI’s longer-term strategic initiatives include:   
 

• Mobile First Strategy: The goal of our mobile first strategy is to transition our digital client experience from one that has historically been optimized for desktop/browser and tablet delivery to one that is optimized for mobile and smartphone delivery “first” with desktop/browser and tablet delivery being secondary. One of the leading methods to accomplish this is to adopt a “responsive” methodology for interface design, allowing our web pages to self-modify how the page is displayed/formatted depending on the device being used. In turn, this will enable us to offer more and more functionality to our mobile device users.
• Cybersecurity and Fraud Prevention: We continue investing a lot of time and resources in protecting our confidential and sensitive client and company data. These efforts span everything from further securing our data centers and networks to bolstering how we handle identifying and authenticating users into our client-facing and internal systems. We’re also looking at ways to leverage artificial intelligence (AI)-based solutions to help us better identify and prevent fraud before it happens.    
• Companywide Project Management Platform: Newport Group has experienced tremendous growth over the past several years and it’s important to us that we not only grow organically and through acquisitions, but that we utilize a common project platform across departments. TDI will be working with each department on a plan for each to transition over to the enterprise project platform.

To download a copy of this article, click here.