(Editor's note: This feature on Judith Haddad of PatriotNational is the first of five articles we will post this week onour 2011 Insurance IT All-Stars.)

Judith Haddad knows there is a specific goal in mind for Patriot National Insurance Group, aworkers' comp carrier located in Florida.

“We want to think of premier solutions and be creative when itcomes to our industry”, she says.

Haddad has been executive vice president, CIO/CTO for Patriotfor just three years, but has gauged the real value of workingthere is the company's business leadership, particularly Patriot'sCEO, Steven Mariano.

“Our CEO is an entrepreneur in spirit and a true supporter ofIT,” she says. “When I stepped on board in 2008 it was truly apartnership. [Mariano] has supported me and my department oneverything we were trying to accomplish.”

Insurers need a strong technology infrastructure and Haddadfeels as the CIO she needs the ability to get their arms around anyissue and pinpoint the root cause. On the application side, Patriothas an older StoneRiver system that it has outgrown. The carriercontacted consulting firms Strategy Meets Action and Novarica toevaluate the system and help the carrier decide what to donext.

Patriot found Paradox Technology Solutions, a new solutionprovider, but one with great knowledge of workers' compensation andthe insurance space, according to Haddad.

“They are great partners with us,” she says. “We are now on apath to replace our legacy system with a brand new policy andclaims administration system. We're on an aggressive schedule andhope to be live July 2012. That's quite the undertaking.”

Such projects can be daunting, but Haddad believes the industryis wiser on such issues today after having undergone the mistakesof the past. The key phrase for such projects today is incrementaldeliverables.

“We did a proof of concept to make sure with Paradox,” saysHaddad. “We know there is a gap between the time you purchase thesystem and put it in. What's the size of the gap and what's theunderstanding of the vendor that's needed to fill thatgap?”

The two-month proof of concept shook out what Paradox offeredout of the box, according to Haddad, and enabled the two sides tolearn that fixing the gap was doable within the agreed-ontimeframe.

“There are few bells and whistles, just everything thatwill carry us to detach from an old legacy system by July 2012,”says Haddad. “Then in the next six months after that, we'll chunkout some other pieces and components that are value-added for doingmore proactive screening of applications that are being submitted,and some additional claims and fraud functionality that will bebuilt into the system.”

Haddad claims she enjoys working with vendors that truly feel acarrier's pain, but admits it hasn't always been likethat.

“You were always at the mercy of your vendor,” she says. “Fixedpricing was unheard of; projects running late or over budget werenotorious.”

Haddad reports more vendors are willing to work with carriersthese days.

“Fixed pricing locks in a commitment I don't think we were ableto get five or seven years ago,” she says. “I think it truly joinsvendors in the industry as a partner. There's a level ofcommitment.”

Haddad's view on leadership is you are either born with it oryou aren't.

“If you have to go to a leadership class you should probablyrethink being a leader,” she says. “Leadership is germane to whoyou are. Passion and leadership are what carry you throughout yourcareer.”

Moving up in importance, though, is the CIO'sbusiness acumen.

“For us not to know the business side is a detriment,” she says.“Sitting in a meeting with my boss and my peers and understandingwhere they want to be today, tomorrow and five years from now isimportant because my mind has to be working in that direction.”

At least two issues keep Haddad up at night. (“Sleep isoverrated,” she says.) Disaster recovery is one of them.

“It's not for the things we've thought of, it's for thecatastrophes we haven't yet thought of,” she says.

She believes Patriot has a solid disaster recovery plan inplace, but what she likes to zero in on are the smallerthings, such as having redundancy built into LAN / WANsupport.

“These are the things I keep pushing my people to keep thinkingabout,” she says.

Patriot had a situation where a switch was blown and the ITstaff wasn't able to connect anyone to the network.

“I said what about accessing Citrix through the wireless accesspoint but wireless access was on the network,” she says. “So I saidwe need to put a wireless access point in each office off thenetwork. It's minor stuff, but it's fine tuning that makes us greatin the area of disaster recovery/business continuity.”

One of her first steps as CIO was to move the data center to theBoca Raton headquarters of Patriot's co-location site, Host.Net. That partner also built a privatecloud site in Salt Lake City, Utah and Las Vegas, Nevada which willhost Patriot's disaster recovery.

“I love the idea because we can do so much more with cloudtechnology for disaster recovery,” she says.

The cost of disaster recovery solutions is a challenge.

“You know it's important, but there's a cap when you look at thereturn on investment,” says Haddad. “Doing it in the cloud allowsyou to gain significant value with what you can do for lessmoney.”

A second issue that keeps her up at night is what to do with thehuge amount of unstructured data Patriot collects—voice mail,email, and social media.

“We have to look at how to capture it, mine it, and create astructure we can use to our advantage,” she says. “What can webuild into our new policy/claims admin system that has that Webservices built-in? We're also thinking of how we can build thosefunctions into our data warehouse.”

Haddad is confident Patriot is already addressing many of thekey issues of today that will likely cause IT leaders to lose sleepfive years from now, including issues such as mobility and socialmedia.

“Those issues are on my plate now to devise strategies around,”she says. “I do think those companies that are not thinking abouteither cloud technology or getting their arms around theunstructured data piece will come up against some problems. Theirleadership as a CIO in providing value-add would be at leastconstrained if they are not looking at some of those areas. I knowfrom my own involvement with the ACORD CIO forum that a lot offolks who are my peers are thinking of these things and what I seeis a strong group of CIOs out there. The struggle, as always, isfinding a truly successful migration path.”