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Cigna’s Lisa Iovine heads up
the core ops strategic roadmap
Re-engineering business processes means re-engineering existing IT systems plus integrating new technology and systems: definitely a multi-year undertaking
 For global healthcare insurer Cigna (Philadelphia, PA) the corporate environment revolves around pro-gress, says Lisa Iovine, application development senior director. That, she notes, puts IT initiatives in the forefront of strategies to change business for the better.
Iovine has been at Cigna for twelve years. Today she heads a hundred-person organization with seven direct reports within Cigna IT (Bloomfield, CT). She’s in charge of the company’s core operations strategic roadmap,
a multi-year project that invests in IT and business capabilities. Her team has been at it for nearly a
year now.
The project started before the recession, and Cigna is committed to completing it, all the more so because it will lead the way to well-crafted survive-and-thrive strategies.
Re-engineering plus integration
Re-engineering business processes involves working with existing IT systems plus integrating new technology and systems, Iovine explains.
“In our strategic roadmap we aim for streamlined and customer-focused service capability.
We want all the teams involved to think outside the box and assume no barriers to improving the way we do business. It brings a lot of fun to my work!” Iovine notes.
Her daily routine involves multi- meetings with people involved in all the company’s many programs and apps, managing issues and coordinating communications. She does some traveling, mostly to meet with vendors.
“My style is very much to dive deep when needed,” she explains. “I want to keep in touch with all the technology and issues and environments we’re dealing with.”
Iovine tries to be a flexible manager. “My job is to understand what I need to do to make the team effective. I realize my success depends on supporting each member.”
On the other hand, “I have high expectations of individuals and I like to drive that,” she emphasizes. “Sometimes I can be a little hard, but I very much combine that with flexibility and listening. I believe it’s a good balance.”
Learning how
Iovine was born in Pittsburgh, PA but grew up in New Jersey. Her father had worked for Cigna when it was under a different name. No one in her family was in the computer field, though.
Her own interest started in middle school; she was pretty well decided on an IT career before she hit high school. It was the 1980s, so she learned COBOL programming on green screens with no graphical interface.
“Some of the things we did when I first started are practices we’re trying to reinstitute now,” Iovine notes. “When I first joined the corporate world I went through three or four weeks of programming training, where they hammered testing into our brains. We don’t put as much focus on testing with developers today, and perhaps we should.”
Iovine graduated from Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ) in 1989 with a BA in computer science. She completed an MBA with a concentration in finance at Rutgers Graduate School of Management in 1994.
Today she has three children, seventeen, eleven and six. As she advanced in her demanding work, she and her husband decided that he would be the stay-at-home partner supporting
her career.
Moving along
For the first seven years out of college Iovine worked for AT&T in Somerset, NJ. She moved through associate application programmer, application programmer, project leader/systems analyst and finally project and staff manager.
“I kept getting great ratings and promotions, but I was always working in the same business area. They wanted me to stay and keep doing it, but I needed to do something different,”
she says.
In 1996 she became a systems consultant for Transamerica Leasing (Purchase, NY), doing business analysis, relationship management and project management for a new lease tracking system.
The next year she joined Cigna in Philadelphia as director and then senior director of IT.
Her development team supported a strategic project for the sales/acquisition departments.
Team building
Iovine moved to a different senior IT director position in 1998 and built a development team
of twenty IT pros which took over full accountability for financial systems development. In
2000 she became assistant VP of IT, responsible for a new enterprise technology and heading up financial application development teams and central technology support teams: some seventy-plus employees and consultants.
From 2001 to 2005 Iovine was AVP for IT audit, a group that covered all Cigna’s businesses and supporting systems and IT organizations. Then she became application development senior director, which involved a move to Bloomfield, CT. She took over her current job this year.
Iovine has always enjoyed working for the healthcare industry, and she loves how Cigna embraces change. It’s a challenging and satisfying work environment, she says.
In twenty years in IT she’s usually found women to be a minority, but it obviously hasn’t affected her career. “I found it really didn’t make a difference to me at all, and actually it was a factor I never considered. I found it was better to focus on the objective and my job: what I’m personally bringing to the table,” she concludes.
D/C
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