Elite 8 2009: Where Are They Now?

While the past few years have challenged insurance technology executives to do more with less, carriers again are looking for ways to drive growth. Technology leaders certainly haven't lost sight of the need to reduce costs and improve efficiency, but they increasingly are overseeing initiatives to drive business value and improve the customer experience. Insurance &Technology caught up with many of the 2009 Elite 8 honorees to find out how the improving business outlook has been influencing their responsibilities and priorities. Here's how they responded:

Lori Beer, EVP & CIO, WellPoint (Indianapolis, Ind.)

My role has expanded to include chairing WellPoint's Enterprise Portfolio Management Office as well as WellPoint's Operations Council. As chair of the Operations Council, I oversee a collaborative process with other WellPoint business leaders to ensure short-term and long-term projects and investments are aligned with our financial and strategic goals. The Operations Council prioritizes projects across all areas of the company, sets appropriate expectations to drive results, and ensures projects and investments are'implemented in a highly coordinated and disciplined'manner.

At WellPoint, we have been focused on evolving our IT strategy -- "North Star" -- which is focused on simplifying systems and delivering new business capabilities. We are continuing our focus to leverage technology in order to improve claims processing, including improving electronic data interchange (EDI) rates, to best-in-class across the health benefits industry.

WellPoint entered into a significant five-year services agreement that extends and expands its existing relationship with IBM. The new agreement further provides WellPoint with hardware and software support, strategic optimization of the company's data storage and processing centers, and an integrated service management solution using the Tivoli tool set, plus the introduction of platform standardization, service catalogs and enhanced capacity management.'With these new efficiencies in place, IBM will help enable WellPoint to optimize business processes to have more control of the IT environment, less downtime, faster delivery on high-priority IT projects and the scalability to support WellPoint's evolving business needs.

We recently unveiled our new consumer portals on Anthem.com and bcbsga.com. The new portals provide a more simplified way to navigate complex health benefits information. For our customers, it means less time searching for information online and less time on the phone with customer service representatives. The new sites also provide many interactive tools that can help members better understand costs, compare quality of physicians and hospitals,'and access health improvement tips.

Kevin Murray, Group COO and CIO, AXA UK (London)

This fall I will assume a new position as group COO and CIO of the AXA UK business. A great deal of my focus in this new position will be to merge the technology and operations of the four UK businesses: healthcare, life, asset management and P&C. It will be a big job and a big challenge that I am looking forward to.

It can be difficult to push and leverage operational synergies with four very different businesses. Previously this was more of a COO role; the technology reporting was less defined. The company has formalized this accountability for me, reflected in the new title. I will have four COOs and four CIOs reporting to me, and the job will entail getting the nine of us to work together to define technology and operations synergies, from application, maintenance and development, and infrastructure standpoints in the data center. I've already started to bring with me the same model that we have here in the U.S. -- the AXA North American data center has reported to me for the past two years. That really helps bring everyone together as one team.

It's a very low-margin business over there -- much lower than in the U.S. It can help the company's bottom line a great deal if we can reduce some of the unit costs. Paul Evans, the CEO of the UK businesses, is expecting me to make a quick impact in streamlining operations and technology.

Over the summer, I also assumed group innovation responsibility around technology for AXA Group, where I've been tasked with building an Innovation Center of Excellence that will be responsible for innovation management and act as the keeper of innovation technology across the AXA Group.

Robert J. Casale, EVP & CIO, MassMutual Financial Group (Springfield, Mass.)

My core roles and responsibilities are the same as they were in 2009. At MassMutual we view IT as an integral part of the overall business strategy of the company. In this ultra-competitive environment, there is a'heightened conversation around the topic of IT, but the questions we have remain the same as they were last year: How do we help drive the business faster? How do we bring more value for every IT dollar? How do we drive greater scale?

Three years ago we set out with two major goals. The first goal was to get MassMutual's products in an industry-leading position, and we've accomplished that. The second goal was making it much easier to do business with the company, whether you're a financial professional in the field, a policyholder or an employee. We've made a lot of progress there. We're finishing our straight-through processing initiative, which is important in terms of scale and growing the business. We also are putting in place a premier customer experience platform that will drive service to a new level for our producers and our policyholders.

An area that will consume a lot of attention in the near future is IT effectiveness, which is fundamentally changing the way we leverage IT in our company so that we have much greater scale and can be even more adaptable and flexible, and we're doing that through'fundamental process change and adding standardization and repeatability to the overall operation. Ultimately, we're aiming to drive greater value and bring costs down.

In terms of emerging technologies, the'areas of concentration for us are'cloud computing; mobility -- and how to leverage mobility in a secure way; and social networking and collaboration capabilities. Our goal is to continue to create meaningful, value-added ways'for our employees, producers and policyholders to conduct business with and for our company.

Andy Edwardson, VP,'Information Technology, Farmers Alliance Companies (McPherson, Kan.)

It has been a busy and challenging year, and there has been no change with regard to my job or associated responsibilities. We continue to focus on strategic initiatives designed to add business value, reduce expenses and retire legacy systems. '

Much of our priority has been focused on the goal of converting all policy lines, as well as claims, to modern processing systems. During the past year we were able to complete the conversion of two commercial lines for all states in which we write business, in addition to staging our homeowner line of business to begin conversion in December 2010.'Business results from the company's efforts have been very positive; we will maintain this focus over the next couple of years to complete the conversion of all lines.

The company also completed many other projects during the year, including replacement of the company phone system, enhancements to the agency portal designed to increase straight-through processing, improvements to our middleware that will facilitate better interoperability within the scope of back-end systems, and numerous product changes that directly impact the bottom line in a positive manner.

Eileen Slevin, SVP and CIO, New York Life (New York)

In 2009 I was focused on maintaining an optimal balance between managing my department's budget and making the right technology decisions for the company going forward. These are still my key focuses. Maintaining the right balance has always been -- and will continue to be -- our key challenge. We are always looking to build even stronger partnerships, optimize efficiency and manage costs.

New York Life also has been focused on the long term. My department has entered the second year of its long-range strategic initiative. The department's business technology strategy looks out seven to 10 years, aligning plans for the implementation of the underlying infrastructure with business technology needs.

Many of our business projects now are under way, and we've really learned a lot this year. As we continue the visioning process for each new initiative, as well as the execution and initiation phases, we are working to enhance the ways in which we work with our business partners.

Andy Wood, CIO, Wilton Re (Wilton, Conn.)

My job as CIO at Wilton Re, a young company that's nearly six years old, is still much the same as it was a year ago. My focus is still on leveraging information and data, and creating streamlined accounting and reporting for analysis, modeling and scenario planning. We believe our information technology core competencies are data analytics and efficiencies. As a reinsurance company, we know that understanding our risk is a strategic imperative.

When we created the company, we initially focused on key operational systems -- such as administration transaction systems, general ledger, pricing and valuation systems -- that we needed to have in place to operate the organization and do business. Now that we're more established, we've been building out business intelligence (data warehousing) capabilities for streamlined reporting and analytics.

I also remain focused on acquisition strategies. We acquire companies and blocks of business, and this involves integrating people, processes and information. It all focuses on supporting business growth and making sure we're streamlining operations and effectively utilizing all the data we have through analytics. n

Peggy Bresnick Kendler has been a writer for 30 years. She has worked as an editor, publicist and school district technology coordinator. During the past decade, Bresnick Kendler has worked for UBM TechWeb on special financialservices technology-centered ... View Full Bio