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

BY ROBERT REGIS HYLE

New York Life has more than $600 billion of life policies in force and is one of the top writers of new life insurance. With more than $200 billion in assets under management, NYL is a major force in financial services, not just life and annuities.

Judith E. Campbell, senior vice president and CIO for New York Life, comes from the financial services side of the business. A graduate of Chestnut Hill College, in Philadelphia, Campbell took the time to be a mother first before launching her career. Thats a lot different from what many of todays young women do, she points out. Once she started, Campbell began climbing up the ladder quickly. Since her start at Chemical Bank, Campbell has held various posts over the last 17 years at companies including Midlantic Bank and PNC Bank. At PNC, she was senior vice president of the consumer banking division, with overall responsibility for $37 billion in customer deposits and 3.5 million customers.

There were times when I was ITs biggest customer and other times when the CIO reported to me, she remembers. Because her positions were intertwined heavily with IT, Campbell be-lieves she has developed a good feel for how IT fits into the overall management structure of a company.

In June 1997, Campbell joined New York Life as CIO, and later that year she joined the executive management committee. As CIO, she is responsible for all of the automation at New York Life with 1,200 of the carriers 12,000 employees reporting to her.

Were doing a lot of things, she says, but the most important one from a technology viewpoint and also for management is a major redesign of our infrastructure over the last six or seven years. Why did the insurer choose to tackle such a project? New York Life has a few very large, very old legacy systemssome of them are 35 to 40 years oldand these core systems are very important to us, Campbell states. We have no intention of replacing them. These systems help us keep a low cost structure, which in turn helps us to be competitive. For example, we have one major administration system for all traditional life insurance products, which works extremely well and gives a significantly lower cost structure than competitors that might have built different systems for different products. However, we needed to build on these systems to be able to provide the expanded, real-time support our various constituencies need to have. She believes having a highly centralized structure allows the company to respond faster and better and is helpful in dealing with security, HIPAA, regulatory compliance, and other similar issues.

Essentially, weve built an information superhighwaymiddlewarethat allows us to take all this centrally managed information and feed it out, usually with a Web interface, to our agents, management, and others who may need it, she says. By building new service-oriented interfaces to its existing core systems, the carrier is going down the road of service-oriented architecture and already is seeing the benefits of SOA, Campbell indicates. Our costs are lower, we respond faster, and we give our agents and our management team faster and better information, she adds. Campbell offers a specific example in the area of new-product development: In the past, we might have a new life or annuity product that would take a year and a half to go from the concept stage to product release. Today, a similar product takes less than six months, and we expect to reduce that time even more.

While implementing these service-oriented solutions, what technology offers Campbell the service she needs? I travel a lot and attend a lot of meetings, so I rely totally on two key pieces of equipment, she reveals. The first is her IBM x31 Notebook computer, a 3.5-pound sleek computer she uses for dealing with documents, spreadsheets, and the like. Mostly, though, Im a BlackBerry addict, and my staff and fellow officers know thats the best way to reach me, she says. Campbell recently upgraded to a model offering a built-in phone. So I have one less piece of equipment, she notes.

Campbell says e-mail is the killer app for her, though. I might spend the whole day in meetings and in various data centers and never get to my own desk, she explains. But with my Black-Berry, I usually can get an e-mail response out in 10 or 15 minutes. It makes me feel like I have my finger on the pulse of our business. Just another way to get business done faster, better, and cheaper. Thats the whole point of a service-oriented architecture.

Special Reports /

Judith E. Campbell, New York Life,

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