TIAA-CREF's Kozik Passes First Test

Talk about hitting the ground running. New York-based TIAA-CREF's new executive vice president and chief technology officer, Susan S. Kozik, was only on the job for eight days when the power-grid in the Northeast went dark.

As a result, Kozik was able to see TIAA-CREF's business continuity plan in action. "Ironically, we had a business continuity/disaster recovery test scheduled for the weekend of August 22," a week following the blackout. After the blackout, TIAA-CREF canceled the test and used the data collected during the actual blackout to evaluate its planning. "I got a good chance to see the team in action. Now we are doing the post-mortems that we would usually do with a test," in order to find ways that the plan may need to be enhanced.

Besides dealing with power outages, Kozik-who had previous tenures at Lucent, Penn Mutual and CIGNA-says one of her primary responsibilities will be to work with business and technology to "deliver an IT structure and governance model...for better customer satisfaction and interaction with our customers."

Also, she says, she has noticed a change in the way the insurance industry operates since she left it a few years ago. "One thing that has changed is the pace of the insurance industry," Kozik says. "We have to pick up the pace because it is a much more complex business. I hope to bring the optimum pace for making technology decisions," to enable TIAA-CREF "to move forward and take advantage of newer technologies."