Neal Ruffalo
ACUITY
Helping to transform his company from a distributed to centralized model meant turning the business into a technology-driven enterprise.

We virtualized 25 percent of our work force, Neal Ruffalo explains, talking about one of the many bold IT initiatives ACUITY, formerly Heritage Mutual, has done over the last decade.

Ruffalo is vice president of enterprise technology at the Sheboygan, Wisc.-based carrier. That title is a functional description of what a CIO actually is, and Ruffalo says the company uses the CIO name internally. He has spent his whole career at ACUITY, all of it in the IT department, joining then-Heritage after graduating in 1980 from the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, with a major in business administration and minors in finance and computer sciences. Id have taken more computer courses, if Id known where I was going to end up, he says. Given a choice of underwriting, claims, or data processing (as it was called then), he joined the IT department as a programming trainee.