Featured in this week’s spotlight is Gurpreet Bal, Head of Enterprise Architecture at Guardian Life.
Bal is Head of EA, focused on serving technology strategy, architecture & innovation needs for Guardian. She organically carved her career from an engineer to her current position. She is known to many as being “elegantly determined.”
What follows is her interview.
Question: How did you get your start in the industry?
Answer: Right out of college, I joined as a software engineer in a financial product development company. My education was Computer Science, so the pathway was pretty set in terms of domain.
Q: What is your current responsibility and what is your typical day like?
A: It’s an honor to lead the organizations Enterprise Architecture team, my responsibilities include Technology Roadmap, serving business units technology needs, aligning technology strategy to business strategy, providing self-service capabilities for solutioning and governance. Democratizing technology info for self-skilling.
My typical professional day starts with a fixed time responding to emails and other administrative tasks. Mentor / Coach an individual. Take meetings as scheduled, 15 mins set aside for feeds for trends and industry. Whiteboarding / Brainstorming on effectiveness around people, program, process. Monitoring status of our ongoing programs/initiatives.
Q: What do you like most about your job?
A: Ability to respond to change.
Q: What trends in architecture are you looking out for the rest of 2023 and 2024?
A: AI and Integration Platforms.
Q: What is one thing we can do to support or increase the women in architecture?
A: Skill more women, provide a safe space and cohort to talk and answer questions that are otherwise hard to ask/share.