In 2007, Andrew Moss, the former chief financial officer at Lloyds, became the chief executive officer of Aviva Plc, the world's fifth largest insurance group and the largest insurance company in the U.K. He immediately devised a strategy to drive 20 percent growth across Aviva's three lines of business: long-term savings, fund management, and general insurance. The company manages about $800 billion for about 45 million customers. Moss's strategy includes transforming the business by streamlining costs and making sure that all 57,000 employees work toward the goal of providing better value to customers.

Since becoming global CIO of the Aviva Group in January 2008, Toby Redshaw has had no problem incorporating Moss's strategy into how IT operates across the three lines of business. Redshaw says that his role is to make sure IT operates at the right pace, with the right resources, and with the right talent. He also takes a bottom line approach to IT by challenging his front-line IT managers to ask their financial counterparts how specific IT projects relate back to the profit & loss statement. Redshaw says the conenction between IT and the company's bottom line is the biggest gap that IT has with the business. Getting and keeping customers or customer turns shows up on the bottom line. IT managers need to understand what they can be doing to improve this metric, and thus the bottom line."

In this podcast, Toby Redshaw, the global CIO of the Aviva Group, talks about three areas that IT needs to improve: keeping an eye on the bottom line, trying to innovate ahead of competitors, and keeping the current talent base engaged and focused on the company's goals.

Bio
Toby Redshaw is the chief information officer of the Aviva Group, based in London, England. Before joining Aviva, Redshaw was a corporate vice president at Motorola, where he oversaw strategy, architecture, e-business, intranet and collaboration solutions, common platforms and enterprise data warehousing and analytics. He also spent 17 years at FedEx, where he held several senior leadership positions, including CIO of a business unit serving 53 countries. Redshaw is the past chairman of the Kellogg Innovation Network (at Kellogg Graduate School of Business), and chairman of the RosettaNet Council.

Resources
Atlassian -  Dan Bricklin Interview's Toby Redshaw on Wiki Use
InfoWorld  - CTO 50 - Toby Redshaw

Production Credits
Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive  Producer
Tom Parish, Host and Audio  Producer
AlarmMusic.com Production Music  Library for Broadcast, Film, Video & Post Production