After two decades working on the vendor side, the opportunity torun an IT shop for himself was a big part of the attraction RickRoy found in joining CUNA Mutual Group nine years ago. Roy, thecarrier's senior vice president and CIO, is running IT again aftera three-year stint as director of operations and he's happy to beback.

“The company was looking to elevate IT to more of a sharedservice as it has grown,” he says. “It's an interesting time [to bein IT] with all the mobility and consumerization going on in thetechnology world. It's also been fascinating being back in the CIOseat.”

CUNA Mutual Group serves credit unions and its members. Thecarrier has a B-to-B side with products and services provided tocredit unions, according to Roy, and a consumer side with productsprovided directly to the members of credit unions.

(Read more about all our 2012 Insurance IT All-Stars:Peter Moreau, Thad DeBerry, Rich Pederson, and Bryan Fowler.)

With so many products and business lines to offer, Roy maintainsthe top challenge he faces is maintaining a critical eye on what'sscalable and what isn't.

“It's not that everything has to have huge scale, but there area lot of things that aren't going to get to a scale and you have toask yourself if you are OK with that,” he says. “It's a continuousprocess because we manage complexity that is larger than ourcompany size would lead one to believe.”

Keeping costs in check is part of the challenge, but so isgetting his arms around the number of products CUNA Mutualoffers.

“It's difficult to become an expert in all of them, but thepremium for me is having a strong senior staff,” Roy says. “Theirability to develop a deeper expertise is important. There's just noway from the CIO seat that you are going to learn all thosedifferent businesses with any level of depth. It affects how youthink about organization, structure, and leadership roles.”

The financial crisis of 2008 was challenging for the bankingindustry and credit unions were also impacted in much the same waythe community banking business was hurt, according to Roy.

“The core mission for credit unions is to make good loans tomembers of the credit union,” says Roy. “When the economy stumblesas hard as it did in 2009, the lending volume dries up. That's ahuge source of their income and a big part of their valueproposition.”

Fortunately, CUNA Mutual Group is awell-capitalized company and the struggles its core market faceddidn't cause major damage.

“We're a mutual at a time where it's nice to have a mutualstructure so you can keep your long-term mission in mind,” saysRoy. “Nonetheless, we were not immune. We have a large investmentportfolio like all insurance companies do and we had somechallenges. We've bounced back and some of that is the power ofhaving a diversified product portfolio.”

CUNA Mutual was forced to reduce IT spending in 2009.

“How do you do that in an intelligent way and balance that withthe fact the technology world was changing dramatically,” he says.“We stepped back to do a hard assessment of where we could take ourcosts without creating bigger, longer-term issues for ourselves andby the same token create some investment money because the worldwas changing and we couldn't stand still or the user communitywould blow right past us.”

Roy believes the set of choices CIOs have today is exciting aswell as challenging. How the carrier supports some of thecloud-based solutions that enable internal customers to get a newsolution faster is among those challenges.

“Cloud-based solutions present new and different ways for us toget solutions and business value quicker,” he says. “Over 30 yearsnow, I've watched IT add tremendous value to business but it alsocan become a drag to business. If it is too slow a solution or thequality isn't there, the negative impact on the business trying toexecute strategy is enormous. You have to get it right.”

Figuring out what solutions can work is hard—butrewarding—work.

“I think trying to piece together where we are headed over thenext five years is where it gets interesting,” says Roy. “How doyou view your application portfolio? Does 50 percent of more of itgo into the cloud? It could be higher for some organizations. Italso has big implications for talent. What do you need in house?How do you cultivate that through the system?”

Finding IT talent is a worry Roy shares with many technologyleaders.

“There's almost a perfect storm in terms of finding IT talentthat's hitting the U.S. right now,” he says. “You have a lot of theBaby Boomers starting to think about retirement. On the other hand,we don't have enough new graduates in IT coming up through the U.S.educational system. The third part of the storm is you have immensechange going on in technology. That isn't new—the field is alwayschanging—but game changers like consumerization, cloud options, andcertainly the way we all run data centers today is quite differentfrom what many of us used to do.”

For mid-tier insurers such as CUNA Mutual, the vendor landscapeand consolidation in the vendor world is problematic and Roybelieves it will continue in that direction.

“When you don't have enormous scale in terms of buying power, itmakes negotiating contracts very tricky,” he says. “We have a largevendor ecosystem that we use to deliver IT. We watch those dynamicsvery closely. I came from that world, but as the guy that signsthose contracts, I'm mindful of where you have leverage and whereyou don't. In the past five or six years there has been substantialconsolidation. That's nice for the vendor cash flow, but notnecessarily a strong value proposition for the buyer.”

An inside look . . .

After graduation from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee,Rick Roy spent the first 20 years of his career building, selling,and deploying software and processing solutions for companiesserving the banking industry.

Eight years ago, Roy made the switch to a corporate IT role withCUNA Mutual Group as the carrier sought to add business focus toits IT operation. Roy has served two stints as CIO for CUNA Mutual,sandwiched around a three-year stint running the carrier'soperations.

“About three-and-a-half years ago they asked me to come back tothe CIO seat,” he says. “I was able to come back and get somethings right that I hadn't gotten right the first time. That's arare opportunity.”

CUNA Mutual serves the credit union industry and itsmembers.

“We have a broad product portfolio, but we're very focused on acertain market,” says Roy.

Roy oversees about 500 employees—most of them in the insurer'shome office in Madison, Wisc.—and another 300 or so contractors onany given day.

“Between here and our offshore partners we have about 800 peopledoing something with IT every day,” he says.