CIGNA HealthCare Names Conde First CIO

Former Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce CIO Juan Conde has spent two decades, mostly in the financial services industry, improving the consumer experience while simultaneously driving efficiency. As Bloomfield, Conn.-based CIGNA HealthCare's (a division of Philadelphia-based CIGNA; $16.5 billion in 2006 revenue) CIO, Conde will use that experience to support the company's portfolio of health services products, self-service capabilities and customer-centric service model in the newly created position.

Conde says he is giving high priority to evaluating activities that still require some element of manual processing. "I'm looking at force-ranking those activities in order to see if there's some immediate, low-hanging fruit that we can collect to further automate our processes," he comments. The goal, he adds, is to "reduce the overall cost associated with those processes, while making them more reliable and predictable in terms of the time needed to perform the activities."

While Conde emphasizes the ongoing nature of process automation, he anticipates the opportunity to create a "significant uplift" in the overall experience of end customers by addressing some salient challenges. "As always, there is a top set of issues that have a large impact on customers," he relates. "We're looking to resolve those very quickly and make sure that we have a much smoother operation from an electronic processing standpoint."

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio