Eileen Slevin Leads New York Life's Investment in the Future

Thanks to the advocacy of SVP and CIO Eileen Slevin, New York Life is investing in an SOA-based infrastructure that will provide the foundation for the insurer's long-term business plans.

Today's business pressures have made long-term planning almost a luxury for many companies. It's a different story at New York Life, which proclaims that it is "built for times like these." Nowhere is this more apparent than in the mutual company's corporate information department, led by SVP and CIO Eileen Slevin.

"What makes us different from so many other companies in times like these is that we're built for the long term," Slevin says. "We're making promises to our policyholders that we may not fulfill for 40, 50, 60 years. Because of our long-term view, we're able to now invest in the future."

Slevin means this literally. New York Life (over $249 billion in assets under management) currently is in Year One of a long-range strategic initiative, developed over the past couple of years as a collaboration between IT and the business units. The goal, Slevin says, was "to define a business strategy that goes out seven to 10 years and the underlying infrastructure work that will need to be done to enable that business strategy." The idea is to have the necessary infrastructure in place before undertaking business projects, and to be able to leverage those investments on an ongoing basis. "We wanted an integrated plan to optimize the infrastructure we were building and do it at better cost," she says.

The projects under way during the first year of the strategic plan, according to Slevin, are focused mainly on enhanced capabilities for New York Life's agents, including new Web-based illustrations capabilities, compensation systems, messaging and mobility. These investments build on the earlier development of the Portal Contact System, a CRM system for New York Life's field force that also enables access to the other applications.

In addition to enhancing agent performance, the initiatives will support New York Life's goal of growing its dedicated career agency force to 15,000 agents from the current total of about 11,000, Slevin reports. "We also want to increase the number of policyholders we have in force and the number of contracts we have in force," she adds. "That's why it's so important that we enable and make our agents more productive."

Key to the ability to launch upgraded and new capabilities on a timely basis is a legacy modernization program that involves installing a service-oriented architecture layer on top of the carrier's legacy systems, Slevin says. The SOA layer will enable New York Life to leverage applications and solutions being installed now for future initiatives, she emphasizes.

Practicing IT Financial Discipline

Such large-scale projects notwithstanding, Slevin stresses the importance of running a fiscally responsible IT organization. "We're making every attempt to make sure we are running ourselves as lean as possible," she reflects. "We deploy some very strong IT financial discipline throughout the organization. We do a really good job of managing our budget and at the same time making the right economic decisions for the company going forward."

This approach is part of the mission of Slevin's organization. "We want to make sure we are delivering for our customers -- on time, within budget," she explains. "We [also] want to meet business requirements. We want to continually optimize the running of our systems, [and we are] looking at what we can do to reduce costs in the operating environment while maintaining performance and increasing availability but reducing risk."

Katherine Burger is Editorial Director of Bank Systems & Technology and Insurance & Technology, members of UBM TechWeb's InformationWeek Financial Services. She assumed leadership of Bank Systems & Technology in 2003 and of Insurance & Technology in 1991. In addition to ... View Full Bio