Piyush Singh, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Great American Insurance

Episode Overview

Among other topics, Piyush discusses the following issues with Metis Strategy:

• How he lead a complete revamp of the application architecture in order to leave all legacy systems in the past
• His priorities around leveraging Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in order to enable data to flow “automagically” throughout Great American’s systems and therefore streamline business processes
• His “Big Five” guidelines for CIOs, which include:
• The need to flip the ratio of 80% spend on maintenance and 20% on new development
• The need to avoid correlation between age, tenure, and risk aversion
• The importance of the CIO’s physical proximity to business executives in determining how strategic IT can be
• The need to differentiate between creating a solution vs. an automation
• How grading IT based on “on-time and on-budget” are the wrong signs of success
• Eye on the trends: How the consumerization of IT has bled into business partner expectations and demand for IT

Piyush Singh’s Biography

Piyush is currently senior vice-president and chief information officer of Great American Insurance Company and vice-president of its parent company, American Financial Group. He is responsible for creating the vision and direction of Great American’s IT strategy in partnership with leaders within Great American’s business operations who, together, consider current and emerging business trends and the potential of the constantly evolving technology that is becoming an integrated part of the business environment.

Prior to his time at Great American, Piyush was CIO of RLI Insurance. Prior to that, Piyush spent time as a consultant at Price Waterhouse in Jamaica, as a banker at ANZ Banking Group in India, and he started his career in IT as a consultant with Citicorp Overseas Software Limited (COSL) also in India.

Singh holds a master’s degree in computer applications from University of Delhi as well as an M.B.A. from Bradley University. He has also attained the Chartered Property and Casualty Underwriter (CPCU) designation and attended the Advanced Executive Education program conducted by AICPCU at the Wharton Business School.

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