New Infrastructure Improves Value for Insurer

ULLICO Inc.'s IT infrastructure today looks much different than it did when CIO Jim Tierney joined the company four years ago.

Back in 2005, the privately held carrier, which offers insurance and financial services and products to the labor marketplace, had just moved to a centralized IT function and needed someone to oversee the transition.

"When I came on board, we had a mixture of technologies, business plans, and IT resources to support the company. We needed to improve efficiencies," says Tierney. "It was my job to transform the IT group into an organization that was aligned with the entire company."

After Tierney reorganized the IT department and aligned it with the company's four diverse business units--property/casualty risk solutions, life/health insurance, investment services, and real estate--he began work on a three-phase transformation initiative to upgrade ULLICO's systems and business processes.

Phase one involved replacing 90 percent of the company's legacy systems with agile Web-based platforms.

"One of the criteria we used in selecting new systems was they had to be Web based with open application programming interfaces that could be integrated quickly," Tierney says. "We selected systems that were highly configurable and agile. As a result, we're able to meet business needs more rapidly than in the past."

Phase one also involved implementing business process management (BPM) to help control costs, improve customer service, and automate workflow routing. Tierney and his team have applied BPM to the company's help-desk function, accounting processes, and support call center associated with its new financial system implementation.

"Applying this architecture to our organization gave us the ability to align ULLICO's business needs with our IT infrastructure vision," Tierney contends. "BPM is agile, extensible, and has the interoperability requirements we were looking for."

With phase one complete, Tierney and his team now are in the process of implementing data warehousing, business intelligence, master data management, and data governance capabilities.

"The key value IT provides is being able to deliver information to the appropriate people at the appropriate time, so we're now in the process of building the tools and repositories necessary to collect, integrate, and store information across product lines," he explains.

Tierney estimates phase two will be complete in 18 months. At that point, ULLICO will move to phase three, with a focus on turning data into actionable information across the organization.

"We're constantly challenged to bring solutions to market more rapidly, and our value is going to be measured in how we support the changing needs of our customers by leveraging the technology investments we have made over the last four years," Tierney indicates.

Tierney and his team's IT transformation initiatives have not gone unnoticed. In 2009, ULLICO ranked number 56 in InformationWeek magazine's annual list of the country's top 500 most innovative technology organizations.

"I'm fortunate to be able to work with bright and committed people, both in the business units and IT; they've worked extremely hard to implement our technology road map," Tierney says. "We've been able to transform our entire organization as a result of this hard work and the support of the leadership at ULLICO."

Tierney has spent his entire 32-year career working in IT. He graduated from the State University of New York at Potsdam with a bachelor's degree in psychology and fine arts. Before joining ULLICO in 2005, he was chief technology officer and president of global operations at VitalSpring Technologies.

As for the future, Tierney is keeping his eye on new technologies, including Software as a Service and cloud computing, to see how they might benefit ULLICO.

"Cloud computing offers a fascinating model as you think about disaster recovery, test environments, and scalability issues," he says. "I enjoy the challenge of applying new techniques to existing business challenges, and these technologies really are changing the way we've traditionally thought about IT infrastructure. It will be interesting as the market matures to see how we can leverage these new paradigms to improve ULLICO's operations."

Sharon Baker is a freelance business writer based in Charlotte, N.C.