A year since going public, Prudential Financial has experienced some change in its focus, according to Bill Friel, senior vice president and CIO. Weve always been customer focused and strived to align corporate IT initiatives with corporate objectives, he says. As a new public company, were focusing on three main areas: increasing revenues, reducing costs, and making continued improvements in keeping our customers happy. He cites a recent project as an example of the cost-savings part, successfully collapsing one of Prudentials three data centers into one of the remaining two. The goal was to maintain the level of service while reducing costs substantially.

Prudential certainly is one of the best known and largest brands in the insurance marketplace. It has $557 billion in total assets under management and administration as of June 30, 2002, and approximately 61,000 employees. Prudentials demutualization occurred at the end of 2001. It was a mammoth multiyear project involving a major number of our own resources and a number of outside contractors, Friel says. We set up a massive parallel processor machine just for the calculations alone. Finding all of our policyholders [who became stockholders] was a large sub-project, and the mailing was the largest private mailing in the history of the U.S. Postal Service.

Friel joined Prudential in 1988, coming from a successful background with companies well known for their heavy computational capabilitiesAutomatic Data Processing (ADP) and J.C. Penney. He started at Prudential as vice president of information systems, moved through some other positions, and became CIO for the entire operation in 1995.