Michelle Hillery

Michelle Hillery has an impressive track record of leading and driving the enterprise vision for business and technology transformation. She is recognized for leading and developing high performance teams worldwide and creating the vision for unique digital marketing and branding solutions. Michelle guides executives and drives technology adoption through both consultative leadership and oversight of strategic initiatives in the areas of platform modernization, digital strategy and service integration. She focuses on Data Science, Architecture, Digital Marketing and Analytics. She guides stakeholders in their journey to realize modernization goals with an improved user experience.

Currently, Michelle is the Corporate Vice President and Head of Architecture, innovation and Platform Engineering, for a Fortune 100 company. New York Life is America’s largest mutual life insurance company that provides investment and retirement solutions. Since joining New York Life Insurance Company, she created the vision and spearheaded the delivery of the the enterprise flagship Digital Marketing platform for the Corporate website re-launch. She created the Digital Strategy Roadmap for automation, digitization of Direct and Agency policy processing and electronic delivery adoption across the enterprise. She created Enterprise future state business capability roadmaps for business and technology initiatives including AI, Big Data, RPA and Microservice Architecture initiatives. As a founder of the NYL Cloud Governance Board, she created the Corporate Enterprise Architecture Cloud Transformation Program. This Governance body represents the Enterprise Cloud best practices, standards and governance model. Under her leadership, the first NYL AWS and Azure hosted and managed solutions were launched. Michelle recommended an application rationalization initiative across the organization that resulted in a 10% year over year application and Total Cost of Ownership reduction.

Previously, Michelle was a trusted advisor for Executive strategic business transformation initiatives focused on digital transformation, omni-channel designs, mobility and Cloud and Big Data solutions. She worked closely with the Chief Data Officer of a minor financial firm to recommend critical Big Data insights to facilitate key decisions. She authored and presented architecture services playbooks for major CSC business and CXO client stakeholders. Michelle led the North American Technical Architecture Digital Strategy Practice for an international consulting firm. During her tenure, she led M&A transformation strategy engagements and presented organizational change recommendations to CIOs and CTOs for mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. She was twice awarded the prestigious Marquis Award for Delivery excellence. She was a trusted advisor to CXO clients for cross-industry management and technical transformation consulting engagements.

Earlier in her career, Michelle held Senior Corporate, Executive and consulting positions with firms implementing technologies before they emerged in the marketplace including eCommerce, Virtual Reality, Web Services and Legacy Modernization strategies. She rose to VP roles overseeing key projects with companies such as EDS, IBM, Microfocus, GTE (now Verizon), The Associates Financial (now Citi), Celanese and AIG.

Michelle holds a BA and MPA degree from Texas A&M University and is the author of Digital Strategy white papers and has advanced training in Data Science as well as holds several technical certifications in architecture.