Henry J. Rodrigues

Hall of Fame Inductee 1995

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Henry Rodrigues, an insurance executive who led a successful effort to save a Canadian company through visionary application of information technology, has earned the distinction of being the first Information Innovator of the Year chosen by the Canadian Information Technology Awards.

Since the beginning of 1995, Rodrigues has been President of Continental Canada's Personal Lines company in Toronto, the lowest cost insurer in the country with a productivity level 10 times above the industry average. But the origins of this success story - and of Rodrigues' key role in its achievement - date from 1987, when Continental Canada was going to sell or wind down its unprofitable personal insurance operation. Rodrigues, who was then Vice President of Information Technology and Administration, felt the company could be saved with new systems that would transform the information technology organization and, in the process, change the way everyone in the company did business.

Rodrigues' new systems made the information technology operation more responsive and flexible by aligning it with business units and putting the systems people in partnership with users. This also meant putting new tools in the hands of those users, permitting them to process their own business. This, in turn, enabled the company to cut the number of brokers selling Continental personal insurance products by more than 80 per cent. Each underwriter was then equipped to manage a portfolio valued at up to $25 million, compared with the industry average of $2 million to $3 million. Continental Personal Lines achieved the lowest expense ratio in the Canadian industry and by far the highest productivity of any North American insurer.

The technology that supported this achievement, called the Sun system, was developed by Dr. Michel Pilote and Madeleine Filion of LiveTech International in Toronto. The Sun system was recognized by the Smithsonian Institute Global Technology Awards in 1991 as one of the world's five finest achievements in systems development.

Rodrigues describes his management of systems development as "an evolutionary process in which developers live and breathe together, and closely interact with management to radically improve results.

"This focus on tangible results, rather than milestones or critical paths or tasks, is the fuel that propels everything forward."

Rodrigues was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1949. He joined Continental Canada in 1974 after graduating from York University with an honours bachelor of arts. He became Vice President of Information Technology in 1984. Rodrigues has also been an organizer and speaker at many conferences, and an author of many articles on information technology issues.