ABSTRACT
When I was Cigna’s (NYSE: CI) chief technology officer (CTO), Cigna underinvested in technology. I tried to get more moneyespecially strategic money-into the technology budget, but I failed. Here is what I wrote about Cigna’s technology investment philosophy (Andriole, 2005):
Cigna’s senior management team did not “believe” in operational or strategic technology; they did not see technology investments as a path to increased revenue or profitability. ey saw technology as a cost center that had to be managed, or more accurately, reduced. ey looked for ways to avoid technology investments. I remember walking out of the chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) office wondering what he was going to do to the technology budget. (One day he suggested we shut e-mail down to save money and increase productivity.) ere is more: while just about everyone was investing in the Internet in the late 1990s with new transactional business models defined around
ubiquitous connectivity, a very senior Cigna executive declared during a corporate off-site that the Internet was a “fad that would be gone in a couple of years.” (Quite a few of us were beyond stunned by the proclamation; I remember us looking at each other in disbelief and, well, a little fear: “now what?” we wondered. As CTO, I felt that my mission was to upgrade the company’s technology platform and business models, but when a senior executive declares that the Internet would not be part of the future platform (on top of the general “technologyis-a-cost-center” perspective), well, I felt like I did not have much of a future at the company. In fact, I resigned less than a year later.
