Peter High conducts a video interview with Ben Allen, an executive that has gone from being a business unit president, to a global CIO, and back to being president of Marsh & McLennan Agency (MMA). Ben explains why all ambitious executives should spend time as a CIO.
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
05-06-2013
There’s a saying that it’s better to have multiple roles in the same company than having the same role at many companies. The former lets you diversify your experiences, the latter can limit your professional growth. Given how central technology is to business today, it’s all the more important that rising executives consider a tour as a chief information officer along the path of their careers. The experience can really turbocharge their professional growth. I have written quite a bit about CIOs who have been asked to take on greater responsibilities, people I call the CIO-Plus. I am in the throes of writing another series, Beyond CIO, about technology executives who have risen to take on broader responsibilities. Ben Allen of Marsh & McLennan represents both trends. He joined Marsh & McLennan through Kroll, a global risk mitigation services organization that was part of the Marsh portfolio of companies. Allen was CEO of Kroll when Marsh sold it to Altegrity in 2010, but Brian Duperreault, the Marsh & McLennan CEO at the time, did not forget about Allen. The company created a new position in order to bring him back into the fold in May of 2011, that of chief innovation officer. When the company’s chief information officer left later that year, Allen took over those responsibilities, too.
Holding both titles proved to be very beneficial. He was able to develop ideas that instilled more common practices across an operating company in which the IT departments that had traditionally acted autonomously.
When highlighting innovation activities driven by his team, Allen focuses on three broad areas. Allen’s team brings disciplined research capability to help identify unmet needs in the marketplace. This requires deep collaboration with the four operating companies (Marsh, Mercer, Guy Carpenter, and Oliver Wyman) and with customers, as well in order to draw these insights. His team has implemented an enterprise collaboration platform. In the past, people were often stuck in their silos, whether those were the operating companies or the geographies that they operate in. Now, leveraging the tools that Allen has implemented, employees from all over the world can choose to engage literally the entire company, or slices of the company depending on the topic. Allen has developed an action learning program. Members of the product management or service delivery roles are ripe for identifying opportunities for innovation. Allen’s team facilitates sessions with them, and then connects the dots between different parts of the organization.
As a reward for his great work, Allen was promoted to president of Marsh & McLennan Agency (MMA), a wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh, dedicated to serving the insurance needs of middle market companies in the United States.
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