CIO Interview: Aviva international CIO Fin Goulding

Goulding has the task of transforming the company's way of working - with agile at the forefront of his thinking

Fin Goulding and his team at global insurance company Aviva recognise the influence that artificial intelligence and blockchain will have on the sector.

The company has dedicated teams that are set up to drive new innovation and work with start-ups and accelerators on areas such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and virtual assistants.

This may be the ‘fun' part of technology that many IT leaders enjoy the most, but Goulding prefers the more challenging task of getting the company's platforms simplified and preparing them to be an asset in powering new front-end technology.

This is one of his numerous tasks as International CIO, a position he was promoted to in April 2017 from his previous role as CIO of Aviva Ireland.

Now, Goulding has the task of managing the CIOs from Aviva's smaller markets: Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Turkey and India.

He is also one of several Aviva CIOs with responsibility for a bigger region: as Aviva has a big presence in the UK, it has a CIO there, along with a CIO in each of Canada, the Americas and Asia. On top of this, the company has a global CIO, a role previously undertaken by Monique Shivanandan, and now occupied by Nick Amin.

This creates what Goulding describes as an "interesting matrix" of reporting lines. The local CIOs of Goulding's region report to their local CEOs for their businesses but they have a dotted line into him. He also has a reporting line into the global CIO and the international CEO.

"It is highly matrixed but it works fine. It is best to have your direct superior in the country where you're based as it's much easier - when your boss is remote it is hard to get feedback," he says.

Goulding believes that in the smaller markets that he has responsibility for, there is more of an element of sharing because the organisations are more nimble on the digital side. But there is a major push for the entire company to become more aligned.

"As we're a big company we have a lot of systems that are quite old that have to be replaced or consolidated so that we can speed up our digital journey," he states.

Changing the culture of the company

Aviva has developed a global IT strategy in which various executives are responsible for different areas. Goulding is responsible for ‘ways of working and cultural transformation'.

"Ways of working drive digital transformation. CIOs don't use systems - people do - so you have to be focused on that," says Goulding.

He explains that with his previous experience as CIO of Paddy Power, he found ways of speeding up processes to get value to customers. This included using the likes of the Kanban scheduling system, MEAN software development, continuous delivery and DevOps. He is rolling this out in Aviva's Ireland base first, and then across the entire group.

"People are enjoying this new way of working; doing stand-ups, it's really great fun," he says.

In his region, Goulding is trying to simplify the IT estate, move applications to the cloud and speeding up software delivery.

"Our delivery of software is monthly, whereas in Paddy Power we were doing it hourly, so we're [still] on that journey," he says.

This is a particularly challenging task for a major financial services company, but Goulding suggests that the company's plan is to overhaul the way everything is done.

"We're trying to disrupt ourselves, and ask what would start-ups do? They probably wouldn't put in place some of the processes we have, so we're challenging these with design thinking, or systems thinking or even lean thinking, there are so many ways to improve the way you work and speed things up," he says.

CIO Interview: Aviva international CIO Fin Goulding

Goulding has the task of transforming the company's way of working - with agile at the forefront of his thinking

As a global company it's been particularly difficult to align strategies, as each country has historically worked on its own plans.

"What we have done with our global CIO is said, ‘Lets get this back down to basics and have a clear strategy for all our platforms and people'.

"We've spent the best part of three months creating that and getting approval at board level and executive level at each country. It's been tough but we're a really very close-knit team now," Goulding explains.

To be agile or to do agile?

Goulding says another one of his priorities has been to make IT and IT processes more accessible to the wider business.

"When you look at agile, it is very much centred on software development, while DevOps is centred on technical aspects of delivering functionality very fast, but the business is often missing out on this," he says.

Goulding blames the jargon-filled language around agile, which is not easy for people to understand, creating a barrier.

This is why he created the term FLOW as an expression - and has co-written a book about digital transformation.

"FLOW is about taking out all the jargon to make it logical to be able to use. I think of agile and software development being in the middle, with DevOps on the right-hand side and the interaction with the business on the left-hand side. It's a commonsense approach, taking agile back to what it should be which is being agile, not doing agile".

But Goulding acknowledges that for a business like Aviva, a huge number of things need to fall into place in order to become more agile.

"You have to simplify your governance, increase your collaboration, over-communicate and focus on having a curious mindset," he says.

In addition, organisations have to keep questioning whether they can do something more efficiently.

"There is a lot of waste in some processes and ways of working in the past, and this had a very bad connotation because companies were looking at how to reduce the workforce and increase productivity.

"Those days are mostly gone, so companies should now focus on how they can get their valuable resources - the IT and business teams - delivering great business value as soon as possible," he says.

One of the ways to do this, he believes, is by empowering staff.

"Sometimes as a leader you have to get out of the way and 'give empowerment' to let people get things done rather than sucking up all of the power at the senior level," he says.

Large organisations often have this issue, Goudling adds, not deliberately but because it is engrained historically in the way the organisation works.

New ways of using data

Goulding says that Aviva is working on a data-related product that will be "game changing for the insurance industry", but was not able to disclose further details.

"There are things we're working on that will help customers but they are very much rooted in how we use data effectively, and we have a lot of resources for data science and analytics".

He states that there has been a growing need for data scientists to glean insight from unstructured data, and also marry this with other data sources.

But he adds that there has been a change in how businesses use data.

"They're moving away from old-fashioned digital marketing or personalisation and looking at smarter ways of knowing the customer and responding to their needs," he says.

"That means how you deal with them through digital channels, how you understand what they need through your data and how you interact with them to keep them within your company, making them much more loyal," he explains.

With the likes of AI, blockchain, IoT and analytics all developing so swiftly, Goulding suggests that the key question organisations should ask themselves is 'what do these different technologies intersecting mean for the customer?'.

Answering this should give them clearer idea of the path they want to take in the years ahead.