The role of ICT is critical to the strategy of 3Sixty Health, especially as it services its over 60 000 principal members, its doctor and healthcare professional network, and processes R85 million in claims every week.
“Without technology, it would be impossible to manually process and adjudicate the number of claims we do expeditiously, and now with our Operations Support Services, at the height of the pandemic we had our workforce working from home. ICT is at the core of our operation,” says 3Sixty Health’s CIO, Tshepo Motshegoa.
“Both our cloud hosting and cloud PBX strategy enabled us to have all our call centre operators work from home seamlessly. We use MTN sim cards to connect to our VPN and this is just one extension of the long-term relationship of as much as 10 years we have had with MTN.”
Cost saving
Motshegoa says it was never the intention to have a remote workforce, but with the cloud strategy already in place as part of our cost-saving policy, we had a head start when the pandemic hit, which came in handy in terms of being able to assist other less or non-cloud enabled sister companies.
“We are not in the business of technology and neither do we want to own our own technology,” he continues. “That needs to be in the domain of companies with the capacity and capability to be at the forefront of the game and able to anticipate and apply what the future holds.”
Sound vision
Asked how his role has evolved, particularly over the past 24 months, Motshegoa says with technology at the centre of service delivery, he has become more of an enabler, but underlines that the CIO role has become much more business-oriented and that the CIO role has to be grounded in a sound knowledge of business and business practices.
“In addition, security has become a critical focal point of mine and I have become an unintended CISO. Cyber security is at the centre of the strategy and we have upped our vulnerability and penetration testing and made anti-virus updates automated and mandatory.
“My biggest pain point, however, is load-shedding, because it affects our remote workforce who do not have laptops, and it also affects signal strength and quality. This is not as much of an issue for post-effect tasks, but definitely real-time tasks.”
Motshegoa’s advice to up-and-coming ICT professionals is that they have to be willing to have a culture of continuous learning and a philosophy embedded in staying on top of and ahead of trends, stressing they need to have a sound vision for themselves.
Creating a legacy
One of his career highlights is being based at Accenture in Atlanta, Georgia for two years, to completely and successfully upgrade telecommunications giant BellSouth’s billing platform, catering, at the time, for a subscriber base of 140 million. A personal highlight is that he is a musician and one of his songs spent 12 weeks in the number-one position on the MetroFM Top 40.
“What gets me up in the morning is my desire to create a legacy for my children, to set an example that others can look up to. I was the first in my family to get a university degree, but now I won’t be the last,” he concludes.
First published in ITWeb Brainstorm.
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