Latest Episode
Peter High
2-24-2016
Excerpt from the Article:
Gary Wimberly is the CIO and a senior vice president at Express Scripts, a $94 billion pharmacy benefit management company. CIO Insight contributor Peter High recently had the opportunity to tour Express Scripts Technology and Innovation Center in St. Louis with the company’s CIO. In this CIO Insight Q&A, Wimberly explains how data is captured and analyzed, how technology can detect when a potential prescription conflict arises and how to reconcile risk taking with security practices.
Peter High: Gary, we have just done a quick tour of the Technology and Innovation Center and I wonder if you can take a moment to describe the center, but then also peel back the onion a little bit to describe IT’s role in all this?
Gary Wimberly: Here at Express Scripts we have a Technology and Innovation Center and it is really focused around data analytics. We bring resources from teams across all disciplines within IT, so not only IT for the technology we utilize, but our economists, our clinicians, our physicians that really are focused on analyzing all of the data that we capture at Express Scripts—and we have an enormous amount of data. I think we are close to up to 20 petabytes at this point. We utilize that data to identify opportunities to improve health outcomes and eliminate waste in the healthcare space.
High: Can you talk a little bit about the variety of disciplines that are brought together in this effort?
Wimberly: We have IT people, obviously. We have a lot of technology in here: not only from an infrastructure perspective with all the servers, but the amount of software, the tools that we use to do this analytics, to ensure that those are operating and that we are developing the right solutions. A lot of them are self-serve kinds of applications, so our responsibility on those is to make sure that they are available and that they are performing to what the user experience should be.
To read the full article, please visit CIO Insight
by Peter High, published on Forbes
2-22-2016
Quest Diagnostics is a $7.5 billion provider of diagnostic testing information services. It collects vast amounts of data: twenty billion test results, one hundred fifty million medical test requisitions in 2014, and testing services that touch about one third of the adults in the US. It is up to Lidia Fonseca, Quest Diagnostics’ CIO to organize, tag, and structure the data so that the company can turn information into insights and insights into actions. By effectively categorizing and partitioning the data, the big data conundrum has turned into a massive opportunity for the company, and it has also made that data much more secure.
Fonseca’s depth of experience in data analytics, security, and developing innovations that are leading to revenue augmentation have brought her to the attention of those who need that experience at the board level. In July of 2014, she joined the board of Gannett, a $2.9 billion international media and marketing solutions company. In this interview, she discusses all the above and more, and toward the end of the interview, provides insights into how she successfully became a board-level CIO.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 16th interview in the “Board-Level CIO” series. To read past interviews with CIOs from P&G, Biogen, Kroger, Cardinal Health, and the World Bank Group, among others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your role. You are the Chief Information Officer of Quest Diagnostics. I wonder if you could provide a description of the organization as well as your role within the organization.
Lidia Fonseca: We are a leading provider of diagnostic information services. That is both clinical laboratory services as well as diagnostic information services. 2014 revenues were $7.4 Billion, and we are growing at four percent. Interestingly for us, we see about one third of US adults, and we connect with half of all physicians and hospitals in the country. We are touching the samples of five hundred thousand patients per day. We have an expansive test menu, and thousands of tests ranging from ones for cholesterol and diabetic testing, to advanced genetic, cancer, and neurology testing. We run the full gamut of medical testing.
We count on the services of forty-five thousand employees. We have about seven hundred PhDs and MDs across the company, which is great because harvesting and leveraging that knowledge is pretty significant, as we think about leveraging innovation, both on the medical side, but also on the diagnostic and data side. We operate two thousand two hundred patient service centers around the country. That is a little bit of the scale and scope of Quest.
On the data and technology front, we have the largest private clinical database. We have over twenty billion laboratory testing data points. We have more than fifty thousand providers and hospitals that are leveraging our Care360 connectivity platform. From an interaction and reach standpoint, it has been phenomenal coming here. We integrate with more than four hundred EMR providers. We are integrated with pretty much any EMR that you can think of. If our customer is using it, we are connected with them. We have a patient portal so that patients can access our services directly. We have had more than two million patients access our MyQuest patient portal. We have a significant Big Data and analytics platform that enables population health and gaps in care types of analytics. It is leveraged by partners, including the CDC and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, to name a few.
We have partnered with Inovalon, and we will talk more about that later. By bringing that together, we have a rich data backbone and dataset brought together with what Inovalon has. It is enriching what is already one of the most expansive clinical databases around.
As CIO, in addition to the typical things you would expect a CIO to be responsible for, I have a couple of other responsibilities. One of the things I am responsible for is all of our client-facing products. It is my team that develops those. We also develop the analytics products, whether it is sophisticated reporting or population health tools. Now that is in partnership with other providers as well, bringing a new capability that maybe neither of us could bring on our own. That is a key part of our thinking is that by combining datasets, can you offer something novel to the marketplace.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
1-18-2016
Perhaps nothing signaled the arrival of artificial intelligence quite like January 14, 2011, when IBM Watson defeated two legendary Jeopardy! champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. At last, the computers were smarter than us. Since then, Watson has developed into a growth engine for IBM.
For just over two years, Michael Rhodin has led IBM Watson, having come to that role after a four year stint as the head of the Software Solutions Group at the company. IBM has already found applications for Watson across seventeen industries in over thirty five countries, but as Rhodin notes in this interview, the company is just getting started.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the third article in a series on leaders in artificial intelligence. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Many people will remember that Watson was developed initially to compete on Jeopardy! versus two of the biggest Jeopardy!champions of all time, and it won a million-dollar prize in the process. Then a bit more than a year ago, IBM made the decision to create a business called the IBM Watson Group, which you now lead. The company invested a billion dollars (quite a bit more than the winnings from Jeopardy!) to get the business off the ground. Was there always a desire to turn Watson into a business line?
Mike Rhodin: If you look at what we were trying to do, this was an IBM Research Grand Challenge going after– from a technology viewpoint– something in the AI world that was known as the “open domain deep Q&A problem”. It was a problem that was originally postulated based on a comment by [John] von Neumann in the late 1940′s. At that point in time, after his architecture became the basis for modern computing (the binary system that all computers today are built on), he made a comment in the late ‘40s that said someday computers will be able to answer any question. For the next sixty years, computer scientists were trying to figure out how to do what he said, which is how to build a system that could answer questions on a broad base of domain knowledge. That was the real impetus for the Watson system coming out of IBM Research.
Along the way, we decided that it was going to be necessary to have a proof point that you could answer questions in an open domain. The Jeopardy!quiz show ended up being a great example of something that had a broad topic base, lots of different types of questions, tricks, use of natural language in interesting ways, and it became a great demonstration of the technology and the breakthroughs that the IBM Research team made. So that was what led up to Jeopardy! in the first place.
After the Jeopardy! match, we were thrilled with the outcome. It was not a foregone conclusion. With any of the probabilistic systems, there is a level of chance in everything, but we knew we had a system that we thought would show well in the game show. We were pleased to be able to come out with a win against two incredibly smart leading champions of the game.
We started a period of what I would consider in-market experimentation for the two years after the Jeopardy! match. We started working with a handful of companies that had approached us that wanted to start to experiment with the technology–not to play Jeopardy!, but to use the underlying technology to start to solve problems. The preponderance of them were in the healthcare field. Industry luminaries like Memorial Sloan-Kettering or MD Anderson in cancer, or in general medicine, the Cleveland Clinic. They all started partnering with us to explore how we could take what was inside the Jeopardy! system and morph it into things that could be used in the healthcare profession. We did that for a couple years, and that gave us the confidence that led to the announcement in 2014 of the commercialization project and Watson Group.
When you think about what a doctor does every day, they gather evidence about a patient, they use that evidence to build a level of confidence in a set of hypotheses that could lead to a diagnosis, and then they make a treatment based on that. They were looking for systems that could start to help them with a particular problem that has occurred in the healthcare industry, that is, the amount of information being produced: the amount of new research and publications has outstripped the ability of doctors to keep up. In 2015 alone, we will produce something around seven hundred thousand new reference documents in medicine. I am pretty sure most doctors do not have time to read all of them. They are focused on how we could start to use what we demonstrated in the Jeopardy! match in the pursuit of helping them understand all of the information that is being published in their profession, and how to do it in a way that could help them create better outcomes for their patients. That was one of the first clues that the AI world was ready to be woken up– we have been a little bit dormant for decades — and that the systems were ready to start to move into prime time.
That was how we got to the launch last year. It became a pretty big point for us because we had decided that not only could this technology be used in health care, which we still believe is a huge opportunity, but we also recognize that it had applicability across pretty much any industry we could see. The way we thought of it was that any profession within any industry where the amount of information being produced has surpassed the ability of the humans in those professions to consume it. That is a lot of professions these days with the amount of information being produced. That part became pretty clear to us.
The second thing that was a key decision about the launch of the commercial project was the creation of an open ecosystem: we would open up the APIs on platforms so that startups could get access to the technology and start to build out businesses on top of it. When we launched the Watson Group we had our early adopter customers that we had been working with, but we also had a small number of startups that we had exposed to the technology in advance of the launch so that they could be ready to stand up with us and talk about we were doing. Since then, the ecosystem project has taken off. We have hundreds of companies building on the platform, over one hundred now in-market with commercial solutions. Another four hundred or so are under development behind that, and they will be coming out over the next year or so. That part is taking off as well.
1-11-2016
Seven months ago, Trevor Schulze joined $16 billion Micron Technology, a global provider of semiconductor devices, as the company’s first ever chief information officer. After spending time as a technology leader at other technology-centric companies like Broadcom, AMD, and Cisco, Schulze found an opportunity that it seemed he had been preparing for throughout his career. He had been an IT executive who had worked well in companies where even members of the Finance or HR teams had technology backgrounds, and was able to make the case for the value that IT could create on behalf of the enterprise.
Prior to starting his job, he delved deeply into all strategic collateral he could, and got to know more about the company and its culture. Once on the job, he spent time with his new colleagues across the enterprise. Since then, he has changed the organization structure such that IT is closer to the other business functions, and has developed a dedicated business intelligence and data team, as he believe these are areas of substantial opportunity for IT and for Micron Technology more generally. He also notes security as an area of increased investment, as he hopes to develop true thought leadership on his team in this critical area.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 31st interview in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read past articles with the CIOs of Johnson & Johnson, AmerisourceBergn, Deutsche Bank, General Electric, and Procter & Gamble, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Please begin with a description of Micron Technology’s business.
Trevor Schulze: Micron has been around for more than 35 years. It is a global leader in advanced semi-conductor systems. As a company, we design and manufacture an incredibly broad portfolio of high-performance memory technologies. These include DRAM, Flash Memory, SSDs (Solid State Drives), and emerging technologies like 3D Xpoint, which we announced recently. In a short period of time, I have been exposed to this internal innovation as a company. I am blown away by how strategic it is. In the world’s innovation engines – compute, storage, networking, mobile, and embedded – if it has a computer in it, it most likely has Micron memory associated to it.
High: I was also curious to find that you are the first CIO of the organization, despite its long history. Why did the organization feel the time was right, and why did it wait so long, in your estimation?
Schulze: We went through the interview process we were discussing what the first CIO would be responsible for. The company is evolving from an operations perspective. If you step back and look across all industries, there is a core infrastructure renaissance underway. The demand for innovations in memory solutions is unprecedented. Micron’s business model is pivoting. It has done from a demand fulfillment model, where we would make parts, put them on the market, and people would buy them by the pound.
We are evolving to this “demand-creation” model. What this means is that we have an expanded set of customers that we have never had before. There are more diversified end-markets, and new operational scale and speed demands. The industry has a voracious appetite for memory solutions. As the first CIO, they recognized that there needed to be somebody with industry experience to support this business transformation that we have underway. They needed someone to sit at the metaphorical table and help drive the new and changing processes. There are new demands for data and insights. There is a new speed of delivery required. Information technology inside of Micron is poised to grow significantly in importance and opportunity. That is where they felt the opportunity was to bring in a CIO and drive this opportunity forward.
12-21-2015
CenturyLink’s Chief Information Officer Bill Bradley has been with the $18 billion company through predecessor organizations for more than 30 years. In that time, he has been a part of a technology organization that has gone from a support organization to a driver of innovation and digital transformation. Part of the change has been driven through job rotations, having non-IT employees spend time in IT and vice versa. IT has also championed agile development, engaging end users of technology early and often, validating value along the way. In a company that has grown dramatically through acquisition, Bradley’s organization is often one of the first to get involved when a company is acquired. In this interview, he describes a significant cultural transformation that he has led, and he describes specific innovations that have been developed.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read future interviews like this one, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: I thought we would begin with your company, CenturyLink. Could you take a moment to describe the business?
Bill Bradley: We are a traditional network provider at our core, but we are much more than that. We offer video services, and voice services. Cloud and managed hosting are services that we recently added to our portfolio. Even more recently, we bought an analytics company, which will expand our IT services offering that has been in place for a little while. We operate both in the U.S. and internationally.
High: How would you describe your role in the organization?
Bradley: My responsibilities include all of the internal IT systems and platforms, and many of the business processes are encapsulated in those systems. We have grown by acquisition, so we have a significant number of systems that we use to support our business. We work to rationalize those over time. I also have a business leadership role with the rest of the CEO’s direct reports, which is involved in setting the strategic vision of the company.
9-8-2015
Novelis is a leading producer of rolled aluminum, and a global leader in aluminum recycling. The company’s aluminum is used in everything from automobiles to architecture to beverage cans to consumer electronics. Much of the company’s aluminum is re-created from material already in the world today, saving natural resources and allowing for the creation of consumer products that have a lower environmental footprint. Through its recycling leadership, what would have otherwise been discarded becomes the material for new creation.
Despite attaining more than $10 billion in revenue with more than 10,000 employees, the company never had a CIO prior to the incumbent, Karen Renner, who joined nearly five years ago. Renner had been a CIO at multiple units within General Electric, and as such was used to process excellence. What she found at Novelis was an IT department in need of new, standardized processes. As she discusses with CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, the journey has been a fruitful one.
CIO Insight: You are the first CIO in the company’s history. The company grew to a tremendous size before hiring a CIO. Why was that, and what led to the conclusion that one was needed?
Renner: In order to deliver on many of Novelis’ transformation strategies, an overhaul of the information technology and data was required. The information infrastructure was unable to meet the aggressive expansions required to enter and provide the data streams required for the automotive market. We also needed modern technology to support our employees working across geographies and to meet growing demands for mobility and collaboration technologies. In order to develop and execute a global IT strategy taking into account the varying regional requirements, the CIO role was created.
CIO Insight: How would you describe the culture of the IT team when you joined, and what have you done to change it?
Renner: We have an excellent team of IT professionals at Novelis with a great mix of technical business process knowledge and program management skills. We act as one team and trusted advisors to deliver best-fit information technology solutions that people value and enjoy using. The biggest cultural shift was to broaden the reach of the team to think bigger and broader–how technology can influence outside of a local requirement to our regions or globally.
To read the remainder of the article, please visit CIO Insight
08-27-2015
The newly formed organization, Jefferson, encompasses Jefferson Health and Thomas Jefferson University, representing both clinical and academic entities. Under the leadership of president and CEO Dr. Stephen K. Klasko and his four-pillar model of Clinical, Innovation, Academic and Philanthropy focus areas, the people of Jefferson (19,000 strong), provide quality, compassionate clinical care for patients, educate the health professionals of tomorrow and discover new treatments and therapies that will define the future of health care.
Praveen Chopra joined the company as executive vice president and CIO in March of 2014. In May of this year, his responsibilities aggrandized, and his new title is EVP and Chief Information and Transformative Innovative Environment Officer. As Chopra explains to CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, he has overarching executive responsibilities for creating innovation-driven ecosystem towards the organization’s “health is all we do.”
CIO Insight: Your title is Executive Vice President, Chief Information and Transformative Innovative Environment Officer. I am quite confident you are the only one in the world with that exact title. What does it mean, and what is within your purview?
Praveen Chopra: You are right, I may be the only one. Frankly, this is a new role, which certainly highlights the boldness in our vision of reimaging and creating unparalleled value in “health is all we do”—and is a direct reflection of the way Jefferson values technology and innovation in health care. I oversee areas such as technology innovation and consumer experience, data sciences, business partnering and portfolio management in addition to traditional information technology functions. In this role, I see us building a health care organization of the future. This forward-thinking organization leverages the power of the digital enterprise in a fundamentally different way and creates an innovation driven ecosystem. For example, instead of a siloed, facility-centric functionality, we are focusing now on a creating consumer centric model through creative use of technology. How about starting the care and learning experience with patients and students in their pajamas at their homes holding a mobile device!
Overall, this role is about reinvention—how do we constantly look beyond traditional IT capabilities and services for our clients and focus on the creation and use of technologies that will help our patients, students, community and other various affiliates.
CIO Insight: What are some examples of innovations that your team has developed or are working on?
Chopra: Our Telehealth program, known as JeffConnect, is accomplishing those things I just talked about. Today, a patient has ongoing health-care needs but they can’t always physically get to us—so we have created an on-demand platform and app, now available in the Apple and Google Play stores, whereby any patient can go and request a physician appointment. That physician will be quickly available through video conferencing capability. We’ve rolled this out to our employees and have gotten an overwhelmingly positive response. We have also created a program for family members of our patients who are not able to be at the hospital to participate in physician rounds. The program, known as Virtual Rounds, allows a patient’s loved ones to join a video conference and listen to the care team so the experience is personal and convenient.
8-17-15
Marina Levinson has had a distinguished career as a CIO at multiple companies in Silicon Valley including NetApp and Palm. When she left the former company in September of 2011, she started a company that helped venture capitalists establish CIO advisory boards, among other things. As she became more involved with VCs, she discovered that it was a field of interest.
In April of 2014, Levinson joined Benhamou Global Ventures as a partner. She brings the experience of a practitioner and a former buyer of technology, which has been invaluable to the company’s portfolio of enterprise technology start-ups.
Levinson has serves on the boards of a number of companies, including Ellie Mae, for which she is the Chair of the Technology Advisory Board. Levinson’s path is highly unusual, but she believes that others will soon follow in her footsteps, as technology opportunities in the form of innovation and issues in the form of cybersecurity concerns dominate the agendas of boards far and wide.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 22nd article in the Beyond CIO series. To read interviews with past interviewees from American Express, HP, Aetna, AllState, and Schneider National, please visit this link. To read future interviews in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Marina, some know you as the former Chief Information Officer of NetApp, where you spent nearly six and a half years, or as CIO of Palm for another six years before that. But, it is been awhile since you have been a full-time CIO. A lot of your time has been spent in recent years in a variety of ways in the venture capital realm, capped off with your joining Benhamou Global Ventures as a partner. Could you talk a about that career path that you have taken from CIO to VC, how those opportunities presented themselves to you, and how it occurred to you to pursue that career path, which is quite an unusual one for a former CIO?
Marina Levinson: It is unusual. I think it is a very attractive career path for technologists, including CIOs. It is interesting that not that many CIOs decide to pursue this career path, but in order for you to understand how I got there, let me give you a little background on myself. You already mentioned my tenure as CIOs of Palm and NetApp. Before becoming CIO of Palm, I was actually a senior IT executive at 3Com. I was there for more than 12 years, and when 3Com decided to spin off Palm, I got an opportunity to be their first CIO. As far as my tenure at both 3Com and Palm, I worked for Eric Benhamou, who was CEO and Chairman of 3Com, and Chairman of Palm, and when I left Palm to go to NetApp, we continued our relationship and stayed in touch. So when I decided to leave NetApp to start my own technology advisory business “CIO Advisory Group”, Eric became one of my clients.
The focus for my advisory group was to bring together CIOs, VCs, Private Equity, and their portfolio companies to have this ability to exchange ideas for mutual benefit. Obviously, for VCs, Private Equity, and their portfolio companies, it is important to understand how CIOs think. The kind of buying decisions they are making and the kind of strategies they have open the opportunity for them to present portfolio companies that can find early adopters of their technologies. From the CIO’s perspective, being exposed to new technology innovation, especially now when there is this tremendous shift from old technology to a new technology world, is a great opportunity to understand where technology is going. VCs clearly are forward looking, and they are investing in things that will be big in the next 12, 18, or 24 months, and that is a great opportunity for CIOs to understand that and include some of those interesting trends and ideas in their long term strategies.
So, I worked with a number of VCs, and I am still advising Andreessen Horowitz. I have been a part of that organization for almost three years, again helping them with the CIO outreach organization, advising their portfolio companies, and helping them understand how to be more aggressive in selling to senior IT decision makers, whether it is CIOs or their direct reports. I have been working with Eric for about a year, and he has been pleased with some of the contributions that I have made. I actually was really interested in how investment decisions are made (I have been on the other side so many times being sold to), trying to decide what to invest in, and whether those technologies will be sellable, but kind of an interesting perspective to see those 2 sides of the same coin. So, when Eric raised his second fund about a year and a half ago, he offered for me to join him as a partner, and I did in April of last year. I have been a full-time partner with him for a little more than a year. The fund is very much focused on enterprise IT, which is my bread and butter; I understand it quite well. We focus on investing in companies in the areas of cyber-security, cloud, mobile, and new datacenter (software-defined datacenter), and that is kind of our umbrella of investment. It has been a terrific ride. I have learned a lot.
8-11-15
Health Care Service Corporation is the largest customer owned health insurer in the U.S. and the fourth largest overall, operating through the Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans in five states: Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. Most are more familiar with Blue Cross Blue Shield than with HCSC, and they do go to market as Blue Cross Blue Shield in those five states. Like so many healthcare companies, HCSC is a company that has had a lot of change exacted upon it, whether through state and federal regulation, the changing practices and needs of customers, or dynamics of the competitive landscape.
Steve Betts joined the company as the senior vice president and chief information officer, responsible for all aspects of technology. He is as a part of the senior leadership, responsible for reflecting the impact that technology is having and will increasingly have in the future of healthcare and HCSC. His role as an outsider to the industry but a long-time user of it has been to his advantage as he has contemplated customer experience enhancing innovations, as he notes in my interview herein.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 25th article in the CIO’s First 100 Days series. To read interviews with CIOs from Microsoft, Starwood, GE, Ecolab, CVS Caremark, and Intel, among many others, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Yours is an industry that has been in tremendous flux, whether it is the Affordable Care Act or state level regulations across the various states in which you operate. Each of these can have profound impacts on technology. This was a new industry for you, having come from Aon, where you were Global CIO. How did you prepare for this new opportunity, the industry, the degree of flux, and how did that reflect itself in the first plans you made for your team?
Steve Betts: That is really one of the things that attracted me to the opportunity here at HCSC. When you look at healthcare and the changes that are occurring, there are many dimensions that are coupled with the technology trends. I feel there is a new opportunity for technology to make an impact and with HCSC’s dynamic approach and position at the forefront of a lot of the changes, I really thought that was a great combination.
The first major trend is, across healthcare, shifting to a consumer-centric industry. I look at it as really becoming a more connected value chain as customers become informed and involved in making buying decisions. Compared to what has traditionally been more of a group-centric model with employers really being the key interaction point for plans like ours and employees dealing through the employer. That shift to a consumer-centric model has driven a number of changes that are fueled by technology. The first is the member-centric solutions that we need to provide, like the importance of the digital channel. Providing the right information at the right time throughout the customer’s journey from enrollment through care management, claims and so forth is absolutely critical. That is an area that we have focused on and we will continue to focus there.
There are many types of choices that our consumers want in this more consumer driven market, like deductible plans, different network configurations, and other different products. When you look back at over the last 20 years, you had an HMO, a PPO, and a couple of minor variations. Going forward, there will be more different types of products that are linked to different types of networks. They drive an incredible level of change and a need for agility and speed to market within the industry.
The last piece I will touch on is data. Data has always been important, but again, as you look at the changing dynamics and putting the member at the center of how we look at things, building those insights on data both within our walls and coupled with broader information across the value chain is becoming increasingly important, particularly as the types of relationships that we have with our providers develop things like value based care.
08-10-2015
The mission of Word & Brown is to simplify access to better health insurance choices. Privately held for 30 years by entrepreneurs John Word and Rusty Brown, the organization connects businesses to industry-leading solutions in every area of health insurance and employee benefits.
When Allen Fazio joined the company in May of 2014, as Fazio tells CIO Insight contributor, Peter High, the team had a lot of talent, but it was not a high performing team. He embarked on a major transformation that continues today, and Fazio has helped technology bring value to the enterprise.
CIO Insight: What role does IT play in driving Word & Brown’s business?
Allen Fazio: As with many successful 30-year-old organizations, at The Word & Brown Companies, IT plays a critical role on several fronts: transforming current operations by providing technology solutions to streamline operations, move traditional products and services to a Web/mobile consumption model, and manage higher transaction volume at marginal cost; modernizing the legacy systems that have been the backbone to the success of the business; reducing technology operating costs; and leveraging the technology portfolio to gain greater levels of value from technology assets.
CIO Insight: You are not a “back-office only” CIO. Across your career, you have focused on delivering customer-facing technologies, as well as helping to run the operation of the company. How have you inspired your teams to follow your lead to become more cognizant of customer needs?
