After looking at a list of the 25 Top Information Managers, one can dispel the perception that the insurance industry is behind other industries when it comes to technology.
Ursuline Foley, CIO,
With acquisition and growth, Foley took XL Reinsurance executive management's lead to a strategy that would realign the reinsurance business from 11 systems to a single global system. She and her team are credited with executing a five-year plan in a true business partnership that came in on schedule and within budget in late 2009. Foley calls it more of a business than IT transformation and has found many new points of leverage.
"The businesspeople in Bermuda didn't know their colleagues in London or France," she said. "We now have governance across claims, cash management, finance, administration etc., and all these businesspeople are talking and telling us where to take the system next."
Foley also serves on INN’s Board of Advisers, and was named one of INN’s Women in Insurance Leadership in 2007.
Sravan Kasarla, group enterprise architect,
Kasarla was nominated to our list by a top analyst as someone who truly "gets" MDM and data quality. For Kasarla, MDM is neither a technical project nor a customer data hub.
"MDM is now positioned to enable the customer servicing strategy and customer centricity at MassMutual, he told Information Management. "And it's only a part of the overall information management plan for the company."
Though the usual tools of data governance, integration, quality, BI and metadata management are at hand, the business shift is under way from policy to customer focus.
Felix Orzechowski, information management reporting department manager for IT division,
Chosen for his execution in governance and data quality at Erie, Orzechowski helped establish a three-pronged approach for data quality assessment, data governance and consistent BI and reporting processes.
"The goal of the governance work is to have huge high-level measurements that drive our process work. In customer certification, for example, we're only 87% confident of how many customers versus policyholders we have and there's a ton of business we could be pursuing," he said. "We're kicking off projects to fix six or seven entry points, shut down the 'blob' entry and the old screens that allow that."
David Vasquez, associate VP application owner,
Following Nationwide's acquisition of Allied Insurance, Vasquez took a major role in integrating the companies' auto policy data in a hybrid model that could report across some 800 attributes and 100 metrics of product performance. Pricing and product departments use the reporting to track retention, minimize customer churn from rate increases and cross-sell across rate decreases.
"We are seeing about a 0.1% increase in our retention in the places we've rolled this out to, an estimated $14 million savings across various projects and states," Vasquez says.
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