Piyush Singh, CIO of Great American Insurance

Summary: In this interview, Piyush Singh, Chief Information Officer of Great American Insurance, discusses principle one, People, and principle four, IT-Business Partnerships, of World Class IT with Metis Strategy. Some of the topics discussed include: 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