Linda Squires has been with North Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Co. for 23 years, serving for the last nine as the carrier's senior technology executive. "I say that I've been in my current position for 16 years, but honestly I've been part of the IT organization for approximately nine and a half years," she relates, explaining that that's when the carrier reorganized its technology operation. "That's really where the shift [in my responsibilities] occurred," Squires adds.

Previously, Squires says, she was strictly the operations manager. It was not until 1999 — when an organizational change was made in order to better align the carrier's information technology and business groups — that she was asked to serve specifically as the company's senior technology exec.

Now the Raleigh, N.C.-based carrier's senior executive for operations and information systems, Squires is positioned within North Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual ($812 million in 2007 direct written premium) as both a provider and consumer of technology. "I'm driving our IT philosophy because of business need," Squires describes. "Not only am I the IT provider, I'm also the IT consumer. In my role I'm looking at our strategic plan and our modernization not only because we need to move off of legacy systems, but because we have a business need on the other side of the house that I also manage."

It is with that unique perspective that Squires has led the carrier's ongoing technology modernization efforts. With projects around a significant network upgrade and business continuity planning (BCP) at or near completion, and major data warehousing, claims and policy systems work on the horizon, Squires believes she has the relatively small carrier better positioned to compete in the future.

Despite her accomplishments, though, Squires knows there's still much work to be done. Her biggest challenge at the moment, she says, is addressing the amount of "catching up" the carrier has left to do. "We have a lot of large legacy systems, and we need to bring the business end users to the table to map out a strategic plan on where we want to be — not tomorrow, not the next day, but where we want to be in three to five years," Squires explains.

Squires identifies a statewide upgrade of its network starting in January 2007 as a major step for the carrier. The new multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) network from Embarq (Overland Park, Kan.), which was completed in November 2007 and boosted North Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual's bandwidth, was deployed across 221 locations in North Carolina. "That connectivity is even more critical today than it has ever been," Squires says. "[The implementation] has been a big success, and we're now driving a lot of the products that we're delivering out into the field from our locations. It's because we have the bandwidth now that we can deliver that functionality."

Significant work has also been done to improve North Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual's business continuity preparedness. According to Squires, the carrier had moved much of its software and technology off its legacy mainframe and onto server environments. But "we did not have a way of recovering those servers," Squires recalls. "We [had] to be able to put the business back in a place where we can operate and service our insureds" after natural disasters and other disruptions.