Bob Olson Email & Phone Number

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

London, Gb

Finalist for 2020 CIO of the Year Twin Cities ORBIE Award. Named a Top 10 InsurTech Collaborator by ACORD in 2020.

London, Gb

Organized a new technical direction and strategy for a business unit resulting in improved client retention. Co-leader of a successful divestiture. Launched a new Enterprise Architecture practice.

London, Gb

Co-lead of the IT integration team following the acquisition by Aon. Led the development and deployment of a Global Risk Distribution System (GRiDS) across the Aon Benfield organization. Significantly altered the IT business alignment methodology to adjust to the Aon Benfield culture and organization, restructured all user groups, created new processes and documents to meet management and SOx requirements, changed deployment practices to accommodate new vendors, and took primary ownership of the GRiDS global governance committee.

Us

Promoted to Senior Vice President with responsibility for all worldwide systems covering reinsurance, direct corporate insurance, and consulting. Evaluated, planned, developed and delivered the systems enhancements and process changes needed to deploy GRiDS as the global system for direct corporate insurance. Created a Project Management Office function in system development to coordinate the increasing project load. Oversaw pilots of electronic reinsurance placing in London and Bermuda, creation of a fully automatic and 2-way banking interface with Barclays and creation of a web service interface for document exchange with London Accounting and Settlements processes.

Promoted to Vice President in April 2001. Key role in the integration decisions as part of the Global IS Management Team formed after the Benfield merger with E.W. Blanch in May 2001, with primary responsibility over global systems development and support. Authored the IT Technical Architecture Strategy for the group. Responsibility for enhancing and implementing GRiDS in the consolidated UK processing center to handle the international business. Resulted in the first ever successful attempt at creating a truly global reinsurance system (several competitors failed at this task). Led the effort to make all systems IFRS compliant. Instituted a new business analyst team to speed up the requirements and design processes. Planned, built, and implemented the inwards and outwards London Market interface. Envisioned and lead the creation of a Sales Management system for the brokers to better track opportunities and partially automated the placements and associated documentation. Oversaw the design and delivery of the claims collection and administration system for the US Terrorism Reinsurance Program. This was delivered in 90 days after award of the contract, passed ass security and vulnerability tests and received high praise from the US Department of Treasury. Also managed significant new developments in the areas of customer extranets, document management and paperless processing, Schedule F Funding, Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund data collection and verification application, revenue forecasting and budgeting, and transition of the finance interface from Great Plains to PeopleSoft.

Promoted to Systems Development Manager. Managed the creation of the first document imaging system for claims with a web portal for customers (I was a speaker at a conference on how to build this in an integrated way with core line of business systems), created a reinsurer calendar year statistical data warehouse, created a Schedule F Funding tracking system, new EDI interfaces for some of our largest reinsurers, a contract workflow and tracking system with controls to track signing status and compliance with NAIC rules, enhanced the sales placement tracking and controls, and enhanced the system to support multiple balance sheets and legal entities. Implemented source code control department wide, formalized the software deployment process, started an intranet to document and communicate policies and procedures, took responsibility for disaster recovery planning and testing.

Forbes ranked E. W. Blanch as one of the top 20 small companies in the country. I took this position to get into a high growth company with excellent margins, and to spearhead a project to move their accounting and claims systems off the Wang system and into a Microsoft Windows based environment. This was done a year ahead of Y2K, on time and on budget, and was highly successful. Through this I recruited and led an exceptional team. We developed a reusable application framework, rapid application development process.

Led development, producing commercial software for law firms. Transitioned from Unix based systems to all Microsoft based systems. Created the first Windows-based time and billing tools.

Eden Prairie, Minnesota, Us

Experience in Design, Manufacturing and Quality Assurance

Minneapolis, Minnesota, Us

Created educational software for the Apple II and Macintosh platforms, created a bus schedule tracking system