Mari Hern Drives Best-In-Class IT at USAA

At USAA, Mari Hern is responsible for the backbone of operational technology as VP of IT business services. Her purview spans critical enterprise platforms like ServiceNow and Salesforce and encompasses service delivery and database provisioning, environment patching, and managing vulnerabilities. Whether it’s assets or data, her group is managing it.

Hern’s team is enterprise-wide, meaning their solutions and processes don’t just benefit one business, they’re central to how USAA delivers consistent and secure service to its millions of members across the country. The leader and her team develop the frameworks for IT operations to alleviate company-wide technology pains. Hern’s remit is as strategic as it is enormous.

Hern, who has been at USAA since 2019, has spent recent years tackling one of USAA’s most significant IT issues: tech debt, the burdensome backlog of legacy systems, outdated code, and manual processes that every long-standing enterprise accumulates over time.

The world’s largest 2,000 companies carry between $1.5-2 trillion in accumulated technical debt in 2025, and it’s estimated to drain some $2.41 trillion from businesses each year. According to a report by McKinsey, chief information officers estimated that between 20-40 percent of the value of their total technology estate is locked up in tech debt. And developers estimate that about 33 percent of their time is spent addressing tech debt instead of working on new features or improvements.

It’s not just about the money, either. Security concerns continue to mount. More than 50 percent of technology decision-makers report their technical debt will rise to a “moderate or high level of severity” in 2025. By next year, that number is set to reach 75 percent.

AI is only exacerbating tech debt. The rapid push to adopt generative tools is fueling what’s become colloquially known as a “tech debt tsunami,” where new debt is created almost as fast as teams can pay it down. The result is that IT organizations must spend time and money simply to keep aging systems running in place, not innovating or moving ahead.

“Tech debt isn’t just about old systems,” Hern explains. “It’s risk, inefficiency, and lost opportunity. Handling it is key to keeping USAA competitive and secure.”

Over the past two years, Hern led the relaunch of USAA’s ServiceNow platform, which transformed it from a basic ticketing system into a full-featured, out-of-the-box solution designed for the future. Even more impressive, the project was completed in under fifteen months, a tremendous feat for such a large-scale project that required complex interdependencies, retraining teams, and ensuring uninterrupted service to USAA’s members.

Hern emphasizes that the project wasn’t purely about replacing the old with the new. It offered expanded self-service database offerings, which evolved laborious manual requests into streamlined, user-friendly workflows. In more traditional tech companies, self-serve databases are standard, but in insurance IT, where tradition and regulation can slow progress, this is a landmark sea change.

“We’re catching up fast,” Hern says. “And I think we’re passing some peers in the process.”

The VP’s focus, at present, is eliminating as much manual work as possible for employees, stopping duplication, and understanding the heart of USAA’s technological relationships.

Her team’s latest mission is to build a true Configuration Management Database (CMDB), an advanced system that visualizes not just IT assets, but the web of relationships connecting them.

“Relationship mapping is how you spot risks before they happen,” Hern says. By advancing the Common Service Data Model and refining CI (Configuration Item) relation management, her team is engineering processes that will set the stage for next-level predictive analytics, risk management, and smarter IT interventions.

Next year, Hern’s team will be focusing on even more process engineering. Every workflow and repeatable task within IT will be examined for manual steps, duplicated efforts, or pain points. The ideal outcome will be a model of efficiency and reliability that’s a benchmark for the industry at large.

While Hern is pushing her organization forward, she does so humbly with a focus on servant-based leadership. The VP says she works for her people, not the other way around. That is the foundation for every decision she makes for her team.

Hern is a fierce defender of her people, and jokes that she doesn’t “manage up” all that well, but it’s certainly served her well in her career and as a leader.

In an important distinction, Hern says that both on and off the clock, her family is the central part of her life. She says she “works to live,” and that she hopes her team shares that same idea of work-life balance. She’s an avid reader, a lover of travel, and both a human and dog mom. Her kids are now attending her alma mater, Longwood University, where Hern played softball. Some lessons still resonate from her days on the field.

“When you empower people, whether it’s in IT or out on the softball field, you build more than systems. You build something that lasts.”