A boat lover, Mark Sanders is a big fan of technology thatsupports navigation. This includes sonar, radar, and soundpropagation devices–or, as he explains, any tool that helpsdetermine “where you are, when you are.”

Such navigational prowess is bound to help Sanders in his roleas chief technology officer and senior vice president at New YorkLife Insurance, the largest mutual life insurance company in theUnited States. He joined the company in April 2006.

Within his first year, Sanders intends to accomplish severalgoals: realign the skills and experience of his IT staff moreclosely with the business; develop and begin implementing amultiyear IT strategic plan; and add features to several ongoing ITinitiatives to improve efficiencies and gain competitiveadvantage.

As part of the IT realignment, Sanders created an organizationdevoted to architecture and engineering that is closely aligned tothe operational group, which handles service delivery. “I'm veryfortunate to have inherited a high-tenured IT staff,” he says.“Realigning employees into more functional areas will help us matchthe skills and experience of all our talented people with the rightroles and responsibilities.”

New York Life has more than 1,300 IT professionals who work inthe company's New York-based headquarters and four other U.S.locations as well as in several international countries. As CTO,Sanders has overall responsibility for the company's global ITstrategic direction. As a whole, the Fortune 100 company employsmore than 8,200 domestic staff and 4,900 internationalemployees.

At the heart of Sanders' IT strategic plan is integrating thecompany's legacy systems with distributed solutions to create oneheterogeneous environment of interoperable platforms, applications,and servers. Approximately 70 percent of New York Life'sapplications currently run on mainframes. A majority of itsWeb-based services operate in both a UNIX and Windows environmentwith a variety of business applications.

“We've already progressed far in the world of content managementand portal technology, but we want to extend that further tosupport seamless integration of our in-house data,” Sandersexplains.

To that end, New York Life rolled out its agency portal, basedon IBM's WebSphere, in third-quarter 2006. New York Life also isdeveloping a virtual e-room project, called Collaboration, to allowmany-to-one or one-to-many simultaneous conversations. Based onEMC's eRoom technology, the project is expected to roll out infirst-quarter 2007.

“This project basically offers an elaborate whiteboardingcapability because it allows users to make presentations andperform interactive activities within an e-room,” Sanders says.“Allowing agents and employees to collaborate online regardless oflocation or time will be an amazing enhancement to ourbusiness.”

Another area of opportunity Sanders expects to explore is how tomove life insurance and investment management products into thevirtual space. Offering such products online is a challengingprospect for the industry, which faces stringent state and federallegal requirements.

“This is a challenge from a business, legal, and technologyperspective,” Sanders asserts. “If we do move into that space, howare we going to integrate our technology with it? How will itimpact how we conduct business? Will we be able to convince ourvirtual visitors to procure our real products? I see this as a truearea of opportunity for financial services companies.”

Sanders speaks from experience in online retailing. Hepreviously served as chairman and chief executive officer ofBevAccess, a combination online procurement site for licensedretail buyers and trade media group for the alcohol beverageindustry. He also has worked as a senior director at Merrill Lynchand held leadership positions at Salomon Brothers Inc., J.P.Morgan, Sun Microsystems, and Grumman Aerospace. Before joining NewYork Life, Sanders was chief technology officer for BFK AssetManagement.

For someone who's responsible for finding the business value intechnology, Sanders says he often turns to consumer-orienteddevices such as his boating navigational tools, GPS system, andiPod for perspective. At New York Life, he looks forward toleveraging his experiences along with the IT organization's vastbusiness acumen to help the business maintain its competitiveadvantage.