The short version, since you asked
I'm Joe Henzi. This is where I write — essays when something deserves the length, photographs when the light does the work, and short notes when neither applies.
What I do for a living
The Cincinnati Enquirer, Anthem, Capgemini. I'm the one people turn to when it has to work. I listen to where the team is struggling, I know the product, and I know the right answer. When things broke, there was a SWAT call. I was on it, and three times out of four I was the one who solved it.
The Enquirer taught me the business. I learned to listen, sell and market on the phones, selling the paper. In 2008, with newspapers dying, I started the discount analysis: what was everyone actually saving on our discounts? It came to $19 million a year. We mailed everyone to say they might lose theirs, and so many checks came back we had to hire people to help. Money in the bank, when a newspaper needed it most.
At Anthem I made Salesforce work. It started as a marketing project; I turned it into an enterprise tool. Everyone came to me for the design, and I laid it all out. It became so important to the company that compliance had to take my admin rights away.
In 2017 I met the cofounder of Vlocity at his penthouse in the Millennium Tower in San Francisco. Anthem was adopting the tool, and at my direction we took it further. I proved it was the layer for complex Salesforce work at enterprise scale. Salesforce bought Vlocity in 2020. Look at what it became. A lot of what I pioneered at Anthem is Salesforce product now — Account Contact Relationships among them.
I pioneered RLHF at Anthem — human-in-the-loop AI decoding RFPs, straight into case install. I re-engineered the whole process end to end, quote to cash, and consolidated all of it in Salesforce. The result was a pizza tracker for a health plan: every step from quote to the ID card, in one view. I built it. Then I rewrote the agile playbook. I taught them how to do the work, and served as release engineer for the entire agile workstream: nine trains, across multiple departments.
Elsewhere
henzi.org and henzis.com are mine too, and point back here.
This site
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