Juha Sivonen - Chief Technology Officer

Juha Sivonen describes himself as a child of the Commodore 64 era. Playing games and coding sparked his enthusiasm for information technology. After high school, Juha considered whether to study IT or something else — and chose the latter.

“The forest industry has long had a strong foothold in Finland, so that became my choice. I was confident that IT would stay with me one way or another, so I thought it would be good to broaden my knowledge in other areas as well. I chose to study wood processing technology, with a major in graphic technology.”

What has your career path been to your current position?

During his studies, Juha worked as a research assistant at the university of technology, photographing and analyzing the results of different printing techniques and paper grades. To handle the massive amount of images, he coded various supporting tools.

“Looking back, I realize that I was essentially doing software robotics, even though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time.”

For his master’s thesis at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Juha helped develop a measuring device that automatically adjusts a printing machine.

“In my thesis, I explored how to teach a mathematical model to estimate the reflection spectrum based on reflection measurements. Nowadays, that’s called machine learning.”

After graduation, Juha worked for about three years as a researcher at VTT before joining Tietoleonia to code online banking systems. Before long, he found himself at a newly founded company called Meridea Financial Software, which started from scratch to build a configurable platform for creating web and mobile banking solutions quickly.

“Since I’ve always been a bit of a tech geek, it really was a dream job. We coded from morning till night — we had very tight schedules. Some even coded through the night, which wasn’t healthy, of course. That period taught me a lot. The product was ahead of its time, so sales were limited. Having a family, I decided to move to a more stable environment. Later, Arek adopted Meridea’s platform as the basis for its earnings system — something I had helped build. It’s funny to think that my code is still running there today.”

His next career move to Tieto-Tapiola introduced Juha to the world of insurance — and through various mergers, he’s still on the same path today.

“Over the years, I’ve worked as a senior designer, team leader, application architect, and IT architect. When Elo was founded, I started as the company’s chief architect. Merging two companies was a huge task, followed naturally by intense development pressure as we focused on building the foundations of the new company. In 2019, I became Chief Technology Officer, allowing me to focus even more on managing our rapidly evolving technology landscape. As the organization has evolved, so has my area of responsibility.”

What are your main duties and areas of responsibility?

“The unit I lead consists of two functions — enterprise architecture and new solutions. We set guidelines and ensure that we have a coherent architectural framework and a reasonable number of technologies in use. Naturally, the goal is to make our systems efficient and aligned with business needs through the right technology choices. We systematically monitor emerging technologies so we can offer the business up-to-date solution options in good time. The new solutions function focuses particularly on the future and on developing a culture of innovation.”

What’s the best part of your current job?

“In my work, I get to — and have to — stay right at the forefront of technology. That brings both variety and challenge. You need to be able to anticipate where the world is heading and where Elo should be positioned in relation to that. Because of that, the potential to make an impact is significant.”
“As a manager, the best moments are when team spirit is strong, knowledge is shared actively, and the team operates self-directively.”