Aviva is a British-based insurance company, which provides a range of insurance products, including life, car, travel and business insurance. The company has around 44 million customers and reported pre-tax profits of over £2.5 billion in 2011. Aviva has 36,600 employees, making it the sixth largest insurance company in the world. Aviva previously traded as Norwich Union. Since rebranding, Aviva has extended its principal subsidiaries in India, South Korea, China, Taiwan and Sri Lanka. Aviva has moved a large proportion of their services to India and China as a result. Group COO Cathryn Riley is a member of the group executive committee and has been promoted through the IT hierarchy of Aviva, previously having the CIO role. She is responsible for the IT and shared devices across the Group. Recent technology deals she has been a part of implementing are contracts with Coverity to improve the quality of its online services and Guidewire, for their commercial lines system. Riley claims that the insurance industry has changed due to the increased availability of unstructured data and that insurance companies have to adapt to changes in the rate of mobility, analytics space and social media to compete in the market. Aviva has an increased amount of its application running through the cloud such as their HR systems. Aviva currently use a mixture of private and public cloud. Phil Pavitt, formerly CIO of HMRC and Transport for London joined Aviva in January 2013 as CIO, reporting to Cathryn Riley. At the time of the creation of the 2013 CIO 100 there was no CIO position at Aviva. The CIO100 panel rated Riley and Aviva for sweating their existing assets, but were also impressed with the scope of the transformation programme that Riley has scoped out. At least one of the panel believed that hiring Phil Pavitt, former CIO of Transport for London and HMRC was a good move by Riley as he has a heritage in transformation. Riley and Aviva's position in the CIO 100 is reflective of it being very much at the beginning of a major transformation programme and will be an organisation that will be worth watching. IT leader:Cathryn Riley, Group COO, Phil Pavitt CIO as of January 2013 reporting to Riley. In role since:16 years in the organisation and over one year as the global leader of IT, group COO since April 2012. Reporting line:Group CEO. How often does the CIO meet with the CEO:As required. Board level seat:Group Executive Committee. IT budget:2% of turnover based on IT cost/GWP. IT staff currently employed:4,700. Split between in-house/outsourced staff:80/20 – most of our contracts with outsourced providers are based on an outcome basis, subsequently we do not measure suppliers staffing levels. IT management team and reporting structure:10 direct reports, these are: Global Technology Shared Services Director  – Infrastructure. Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Digital, Strategy & Architecture Director. AD&M Director. IT & Business Change Director – Functions. IT & Business Change Director – UK Life & Pensions. IT & Business Change Director – UK GI. COO – Higher Growth Markets. Global Operational Shared Services Director. COO – Aviva Investors. Primary technology platforms at the organisation:As a global composite insurance company we have numerous core technologies to cover our lines of business – we have approximately 1,450 applications – the main ones include Life 70, Oracle EBS,  Workday, Guidewire, Magnitude, Sharepoint. Who are your primary technology suppliers?HP, IBM, C&W, Microsoft, TCS, WIPRO, Oracle, Dell, Capgemini, Guidewire, Workday. Percentage of your applications/infrastructure run from the cloud:5%. Major technology or transformation project recently completed and how did it transform operations, customer experience or the organisation:We have circa 500 projects on the book of work, which cover the range of Aviva’s value chain with IT playing a significant role in the majority of them. Below are some examples. Digital Pilots –  Six digital pilots covering the scope of our value chain were instigated, delivered and evaluated in a six month timeframe. Digital has proven we can be even more innovative whilst delivering better, faster and cheaper propositions for our customers. Aviva is also undertaking two significant transformation programmes within the UK General Insurance business – Commercial Transformation and Ireland Transformation Programme. Both these programmes support our business simplification agenda. Commercial Transformation – the primary objective is to increase premium revenue and market share across mid and high value corporate markets whilst retaining a leading position in the small business market. The key drivers to meet this challenge are: Reduction of operating cost through more cost effective use of resources and streamlining of systems and processes. Profitable growth through better market segmentation and insight. Improve speed to market of new products and reduce complexity and increase flexibility of existing offerings. Improving distribution channel efficiency and productivity through integrated and automated quotation and policy administration solutions. Reduction of claims and underwriting leakage. Supporting the CSR drivers of Governance and Control enabling them to increase the size of their book of business. Ireland Transformation Programme – the primary objective is to transition the Irish GI business into the UK, on the basis that UK experience, scale and capability can be leveraged to create more value for the Irish business. Guidewire was chosen to be the strategic commercial policy and claims administration platform. It is a key component of the Commercial Transformation led by the business and the delivery will be a single solution for the UK & Ireland Region. This will rationalise the way Commercial products are constructed to simplify our services & back office. It is also the platform on Canadian business and migrating to. Did the above project reach its cost, timing and transformation objective:Yes, our focus is around delivering on time, on budget and exceeding customer expectations. Business transformation programme – beyond technology – that the CIO owns or is a major contributor to:Simplify Programme  – we have embarked on a restructure to make Aviva simpler, leaner and more agile through the mechanisms of delayering, process, technology, governance and culture. The role of the functions including IT has been strengthen to drive more standardised global approach. At the same time we are delegating more authority to the business and streamlining approvals such that executives have more autonomy but also increased accountability within the centrally defined frameworks. Together this should enable us to make quicker decisions, be less hierarchical and bureaucratic, ensure agility at the front end. I have transformed the new IT structure to ensure proximity and alignment to the business so we can realise the global opportunity to connect priorities, re-use and do things once, in every case possible. This is all about harnessing the power of a global company and executing brilliantly at a local level for our customers and distributors. Technology is critical to our business. With my appointment to the Exec this has been the first time IT has been represented at Group Executive level. The emergence of social media, mobile and digital technologies is fundamentally changing how customers want to do business with us. We are and we have to transform to exploit this opportunity. Strategic aim of the CIO and IT operation for the next financial year:Institute a programme to standardise technology and operations across the group. Strategy in the use by employees of their own technology, use of mobiles and how social networking is impacting operations, customer experiences or the organisation:Bring Your Own Device is something we are actively exploring. The impact of social media is growing daily and Aviva is already embracing it to ‘listen’ to the customer and be proactive around dealing with customer issues and then turning them into advocates. Embracing and exploring these latest technology trends is also helping us attract the next generation of employees to Aviva. Strategy for dealing with shadow IT and BYOD including influence and engagement with executives, to place the right controls around employee choice:I see shadow IT as an important source of innovation and Aviva have looked to embrace this. We recently completed a global App Competition where we asked members of Staff (both IT and business) to submit prototype apps that would add value to Aviva – over 30 prototypes were submitted and evaluated online by the senior leadership community, making effective use our global collaboration tool and keeping cost down to less than £10k – the top five apps are currently being productionised and one is already live and on the App store. We see BOYD as a part of our digital journey and we are currently scrutinising our requirements around control, security and reliability. Technologies being considered to enable transformation:Semantic technology, Cloud, Mobile apps, Social Media, Big Data, Analytics. Transformational inspiration sources:The external world.