Talk to any of the people in my organization, Tony Candito says, and theyll tell you Im a geek at heart.
Maybe he is at heart, but at work Candito is senior vice president and chief information officer of individual business, operations, and technology. Its a mouthful, he admits. Its also a big jobCIO of the largest operating unit of MetLife, the largest life insurer in the U.S., with over $2.4 trillion of insurance in force as of the end of 2002. Beyond heading up the companys IT, he is responsible for compliance and MetLifes customer response center.

Job aside, he also gets to exercise his love of technology at home. Ahead of the growing trend of homeowners to forsake traditional desktop computers for notebooks, Candito and his wife, a speech pathologist, have long had only portable computers. For many years, we had a wired household, he says, but a couple of years ago I wanted to experience firsthand what a wireless network was like, so I could envision how it would work in our sales offices. He replaced the wired network with a wireless one, connecting their individual notebooks to each other and to the remote printer they keep in a different part of the house.

Candito also is a big believer in Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP), signing up to receive as many bills electronically as he can. All the statements from various financial accounts and holdings feed automatically into Quicken, which hes used faithfully for years. Where EBPP isnt available, he pays his personal bills electronically.

Typically one to be first into the electronic pool, Candito was part of the original pilot program at MetLife for the BlackBerry when it first came out. I couldnt live without it, he asserts. He recently was testing the newest Black-Berry, with a built-in phone and browser, but says, I havent decided if I like it or not.

He didnt start out as geek, nor did he start out at MetLife. He graduated from Bridgewater State College, in Massachusetts, in 1974, with a BA degree in physiological psychology. To pay the bills while his wife got her masters degree, Candito decided to capitalize on his science background by getting a job as a quality assurance analyst at New England Financial. I really liked it, he remembers, pointing out that QA is a very rigorous profession when done right. He also got to participate in forming an independent testing organization, then a new concept in the insurance and financial services field.

I didnt learn the technology, he says regarding his experience in those early days. I learned the business. A QA person spends literally hundreds of hours with the IT staff, learning how all the systems interact with one another. The first time the IT folks asked him to join their operation, he passed on it. In 1979, when they asked again, he reconsidered. I went home and told my wife, You know, I really think computers are going to be big, he recalls, laughing about it. He decided to make the switch, joined the IT side of the house, and began working with the systems during the day and teaching himself programming languages at night. He also started moving up the ranks, assuming more managerial responsibilities.

In 1996, New England Financial was acquired by MetLife, and Candito began learning about IT and IT management in a much larger company. A former MetLife CIO, Robert McKinney, took Candito under his wing and worked with him until his death a few years later. He really taught me what I needed to know to be a CIO of a major financial institution, he says.

Along the way, Candito says he had to make a major decisionwhich of three different paths to follow. One was to be an individual contributor, possibly in a quasi-consulting role, using all the insurance and systems knowledge he learned from his quality assurance days. Another was to go into the computer science part of the business, which really appealed to him. The third was to assume a leadership and management role in the business. Nobody can do all three, his mentor had told him. You might be able to major in one and minor in another, but youve got to choose.

Candito decided to take the leadership and management path and has had an extremely successful career as a result. But, Ive never lost my love of computer science. A true automated executive.

Special Reports /

A glimpse inside the personal technology arsenal and strategies that empower todays leading insurance IT professionals.

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