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Cargou Manages Thousands One at a Time

By Matt Villano

June 01, 2001 — CIO — Home to embassies, tony row houses and the ƒlysŽe Palace, the eighth arrondissement is one of Paris’s oldest and most celebrated neighborhoods. This is where Claude Cargou, executive vice president of information systems and e-business for Paris-based AXA Group, feels most comfortable. At a time when many IT executives are basing their careers on a mastery of new technology, Cargou is a Renaissance man, combining battle-tested business acumen with broad-sweeping technological expertise. His favorite thinker is no business prophet or tech guru; he’s the 17th century mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal. Cargou heads a massive global IT organization, yet in his spare time collects antique adding machines.

"I guess you could say I am old-fashioned," Cargou offers in English with a French accent as thick as a hearty bŽchamel sauce. "I see it as this: I like what I like, and I lead in the way I feel most comfortable."

For Cargou, this means frequent contact with his direct reports and an accent on teamwork rather than technology. He sees himself as a godfather, growing the business by nurturing the people who make it run. This leadership philosophy has yielded some strong results. Since Cargou became CIO in 1991, AXA has engineered a slew of mergers and acquisitions to become the largest insurance group in the world, grossing $73.7 billion in 2000. During that same span, he transformed the group’s IT organization from a centralized, insular operation to an international force with outposts in more than 60 countries. He now oversees 11,200 IT professionals and a budget of $1.9 billion.

Cargou spent most of his early years at AXA integrating the systems of the new acquisitions. When the group’s M&A spree slowed in 1998, Cargou seized the opportunity to consolidate, developing the group’s first global technology strategy, along with a five-year implementation plan. He set up a complex and decentralized structure for IT planning, consisting of standardization committees and across-the-board reinvestment policies, two groups that bring CIOs and CEOs together.

The crux of Cargou’s IT edifice is a CEO and CIO governance team, comprising business and technology leaders from all 50 of AXA’s operating companies. This group is charged with planning the group’s IT future. The Information Services Board, a subgroup consisting of CIOs and CEOs from AXA’s 10 largest operating companies, decides on groupwide IT investments. These two teams prevent fragmentation among far-flung business units and create a unified plan for IT, Cargou says.

 

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