How innovative is Optum?

Optum has the same problem most large corporations have with innovation: management. There are something like 5 bosses between me (Sr. Developer) and the guy who approves budget for projects, and all of them have to be on board with my idea for it to happen. Then they have to support it (governance, arbitration, allocation, etc.). In my experience at Optum, at any given time usually at best 2 of the 5 are capable, and the other 3 are just trying to climb the ladder, so unless your idea benefits their career you're probably S.O.L. Also, we spend a lot of our time putting out fires senior management starts: they'll swap out entire well-running teams to save a penny at the cost of a pound, reverse course on office locations and telecommuting costing us valuable colleagues and in-house knowledge, or impose an immediate, under-funded implementation of the new hot thing. It's hard to develop a great idea when you have to work around bad ones so often.

Optum has some really talented people with some very good ideas. Most of those ideas are stifled by a senior management team that can't or won't enable them.

Very, they have some very cool and interesting tech.

They still think Cloud is the next big thing...