Robert Boccia, CIO of Lion of Africa, races superbikes. It's perhaps this need for speed that has propelled him into ensuring that Lion of Africa is an early adopter of Microsoft products - it has already been running Windows 8 for two years, and will be adopting Windows 10 soon.
Before joining Lion of Africa, Boccia was the CIO for Africa and lead for Technology Strategy at Microsoft. There, he was instrumental in developing a concept called IT showcase, which took the software giant's internal IT story out to customers globally.
Boccia started to offer understanding of enterprise architecture to developers, with the ultimate upshot that IT was critically involved in almost every enterprise product that came out of the organisation.
During this time, he was also a founding member of the SA CIO Council and remains actively involved in establishing an IT-focused MBA, to provide and guarantee executive-level IT skills in the industry. As a former 'bean counter' himself, he understands only too well that IT skills don't necessarily come from a straightforward qualification in IT.
In 2012, he joined Lion of Africa to bring the insurance company's IT organisation from basic to rationalised levels of maturity. He's confident he has achieved this in two short years, as verified by its satisfactory audit and positive feedback from its brokers.
Insurance is an interesting industry to be in, because technology and the regulatory environment are causing a lot of upheaval. The Solvency Asset and Management (SAM) Framework comes into effect in 2016 and will change the way insurance intermediaries do business, requiring a great deal of preparation from insurance companies.
Technology is also making it possible for insurance to deliver coverage that is responsive to clients' particular risk profiles.
This means that insurers now have the capability to positively influence their clients' behaviour, Boccia says. For instance, a municipality that Lion of Africa now insures could be encouraged to fill in potholes to limit its exposure to liability.
He says he inherited a dysfunctional team, but in two years, they've changed the way IT is viewed in the organisation so that the department is now engaged in almost every concept discussion on business strategy.
At the Lion of Africa annual awards ceremony last year, IT took six of the nine awards, including Best Department, Best Manager and Innovator of the Year - a change that he says has been quite dramatic.
This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.
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