CASE 3: AETNA LIFE AND CASUALTY

In 2000, ING acquired Aetna Life and Casualty, a financial services company with headquarters
in Hartford, Connecticut. ING is headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Aetna is now
ING Life Insurance and Annuity Company.

Before being acquired by ING much of Aetnas IT work had been decentralized; therefore, the
corporate administration department focused on three, functions, which they called plan,
build and run. The operations group ran data center and telecommunication operations. The
corporate technology services group assisted divisions in selecting, building, and implementing
computer systems. The people and technology group also helped divisions build and implement
successful systems; they emphasized the human perspective.

The plan function was the responsibility of the corporate technology planning group, which
was meant to be a catalyst for introducing new technology. Its charter was to help the in-
surance company understand and use breakthrough technologies. By breakthrough they
meant technologies that would increase performance by at least 100 percent. We constantly
seek to make the future credible by encouraging innovation, experimentation, and evaluation,
a member of this group told us. They saw their job as encouraging end users to talk about new
technologies and test them out in real life situations. The corporate technology planning
group fostered discussions and experimentation in three ways.

They Sought Out Business Champions

The group tested technologies by cosponsoring business projects, acting as a magnet, to

attract people who wanted to experiment with a technology. They held workshops on specific
technology, published one-page issue papers describing certain technologies, and talked to
people in a wide number of functions,

Their goal was to find business champions who thought a technology might solve their business
problem. These champions also needed to be willing to share the funding and direction of a
pilot project using that technology. The users agreed to let the planning group study their use
and write about it For a project to be funded, it had to have a business champion arid be aimed
at solving a business problem.

In several cases, the group found champions who recognized the need to test several
technologies, some with expected results and others that might change future work life
dramatically. These were smart champions because they saw the value of investing in a
portfolio of new technologies.

They Studied Pilot Projects

In one pilot project of a 500- user communication system, the planning group did systematic
research during the pilot, using before-and-after questionnaires to measure how attitudes
changed. They looked to see whether telephone tag increased or decreased. They held focus
group discussions. In addition, they had some users keep daily diaries of their activities.

Based on this research, they concluded that the system would benefit a majority of employees.
To then promote its use, they created a brochure and videos, which they handed off to the cor-
porate operations group for the marketing and management of the system.

They Established Steering Committees

Steering committees can be surrogate champions to guide and build support for a new
technology. When the corporate technology group saw a technology that appeared interesting,
they sometimes held a one-day magnet session to find champions. Sometimes they found
steering committees rather than individual champions when a topic was really hot. In one
case 200 people volunteered to do pilot projects. Because it made too large a group, a smaller
steering committee was formed. It put on four seminars, got end users thinking about how they
might use the technology, and oversaw some projects.

Challenges They Encountered

The technology planning group encountered three challenges.

One was simply g e t t i n g peoples a t t e n t i o n . When a technology was not immediately

available, people did not want to take any action. However, many technologies require a
learning curve. Even when a technology is not readily available people should be experimenting
with it so that the company has in-house knowledge when products do begin to appear. Thus
making a future technology credible to people was one hurdle.

Keeping people in an experimental mode was another challenge. Once people were funded for
a pilot, they wanted to do it right. They did not want to create a quick-and-dirty system they
wanted to create a production-quality system. It was hard to get people to create only quick
experimental systems.

The third challenge was making sure that the use would really pay off. The planning group did
not want small productivity improvements they wanted orders-of-magnitude improvements
at least two-to-one to three-to-one payoffs. They constantly asked users: How do you know you
will get this payback?

The groups goals were education and action. They wanted end users to be comfortable using
future technologies and achieve a good payback at the same time. For more ideas on how to
stimulate innovation see Managing Organizational Innovation.10

Such an approach puts companies in a position to more likely spot new opportunities
experiment with them, and put them into widespread use before their competitors. In a fast-
changing world, nimbleness as a sign of being open to accepting emerging technologies is
needed.

Case Questions:
1. What is the major focus of the case?
2. List out the key points highlighted in the case.