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John Brighton

John Brighton Title: Corporate CIOCompany: Aetna Inc. Title: Corporate CIO Company: Aetna Inc. Location: Hartford, Conn. Industry: Managed healthcare and financial services Educational background: MBA, Financial Management, St. John’s University, New York B.S., Business Administration, Seton Hall University, South Orange, N.J. Years in IT: 33 years Experience: 1994-1996, CIO, U.S. Healthcare Inc., Blue Bell, Pa. […]

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John Brighton

Nov 1, 1999

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John Brighton
Title: Corporate CIO
Company: Aetna Inc.

Title: Corporate CIO

Company: Aetna Inc.

Location: Hartford, Conn.

Industry: Managed healthcare and financial services

Educational background:

MBA, Financial Management, St. John’s University, New York

B.S., Business Administration, Seton Hall University, South Orange, N.J.

Years in IT: 33 years

Experience:

1994-1996, CIO, U.S. Healthcare Inc., Blue Bell, Pa.
1984-1994, CIO, Bell Atlantic Enterprises, Philadelphia; and vice president, Bell Atlantic Network Services, Arlington, Va.
1982-1984, CIO, Hapag-Lloyd Inc., New York
1977-1982, vice president IT, General Electric Environmental Services Inc., Lebanon, Pa.

Career advice: enthusiasm, commitment, education, and balance

ENTHUSIASM: Enjoy what you do. An “up” enthusiastic attitude influences performance and is contagious.
COMMITMENT: Commit to excellence in everything you do. Follow the “Shadow of the Leader” concept, your actions speak louder than your words.
EDUCATION: Never stop learning. Take every opportunity to educate yourself. Manage your own development.
BALANCE: Remember your priorities. A balance between your commitments at work and your responsibilities at home is important. When you ignore either, you will loose both.

Biggest career challenge: Managing the acquisition and integration of four very large managed healthcare companies within a three-year span while initiating major development initiatives in e-health and financial services and completing our Y2K conversion. This integration is still in progress. The conversion project amounted to remediating more than 200 million lines of code and renegotiating hundreds of contracts.

Merging the four managed healthcare companies involves 21 million members, an employee base of over 50,000 people, hundreds of offices/facilities, and thousands of applications and systems. Additionally we are consolidating eight data centers into two primary megacenters and reconfiguring multiple voice and data networks into a single corporate-wide fiber backbone network. The project is not without issues, but those issues have been bridged through an extraordinary team effort between the business and IT personnel. I’d say the number of issues our team has had to deal with in the last three years is more than most companies face in a lifetime.

Technical architecture guiding principle: Standards, standards, standards. Without standards you have runaway IT costs, islands of disparate systems and second-class service. It’s tough, and you are often tempted to stray from the course, but it is one guiding principle that works.

Last two books read: Business @ the Speed of Thought, by Bill Gates; and The Great Transition: Using the Seven Disciplines of Enterprise Engineering to Align People, Technology, and Strategy, by James Martin

Last vacation: Galapagos Islands

Hobbies: Tennis, golf, travel

Family: Married 34 years to wife Rita; three children: Scott, Kelly, Chris

Favorite quote: Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art. –Eleanor Roosevelt