Council Spotlight: Shawn McCarthy

Innovation Advisory Council Spotlight: Shawn McCarthy of Manulife

For November's Innovation Advisory Council Spotlight, we're excited to feature, Shawn McCarthy, Vice President, Global Architecture at Manulife.

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Q: What are your current goals for this year?
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1) Fill the important roles within the Enterprise Architecture practice to focus on APIs, Security, Data, Solution Architecture, and Cross-Enterprise capabilities.This is through the enablement transformation of behavior and leveraging advanced technology and techniques to lead the organization to the future to create the #1 wealth and asset management company in the world where we delight our customers

‍2) Mature API/IntegrationImagine a world where we have a common set of practices, language and guidelines for APIs, where our APIs look like they were developed by one team, and development teams start with an API that solves all framing and plumbing aspects of their solution and allows teams to accelerate innovations.

‍3) Cross-Enterprise ModelsLead with a teaching mindset to enable the GWAM technologists to “do the right thing” through pragmatic, effective and scalable architectures, standards and practices.

‍4) Empowered Governance ModelsTo drive consistency while scaling and measuring the architecture practice through partnerships by focusing on the customer needs and inspiring through a teaching mindset. Adopting a teaching mindset to enable teams to make the right decision as part of integrated architecture/engineering culture

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Q: What kind of leader are you?
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I lead through a teaching mindset/coach; My motto is to “Inspire Growth” and I believe my purpose is to learn, adapt and evolve the innovation in others – this is the theme that will show up.

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Q: What are you most proud of?
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First, The design and development of a custom course at the University of Colorado CSC3916: Web API Technologies; where students learn to build and end to end solution including good engineering practices (Testing, Source Code Control, Deployment Automation) in the development of a IMDB lite application (React Front-end, Secure API and NoSQL Database).

Second, the design and development of a professional development for college students entering large enterprise - Imagine for a moment where we over invest in organizational design, talent and leadership development and create a program that can unlock our potential, provide tours of duty through engineering tracks in an accelerated professional development program to empower the next generation of engineers with the cross-functional skills and future technologies that drive our organization forward and at the same time create a healthy organizational model.  

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Q: What are you currently doing to entertain yourself?

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I’m taking a PhD course on Mixed Methods Research (that uses Quantitative and Qualitative methods) and applying it to research into Web API reuse - Although the concept of building for reuse (building a capability once) seems intuitive, large enterprises continue to struggle to encapsulate these capabilities across organization boundaries, manage the discovery, usage (usability) and evolution of these Web API assets.

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