Andy Maier, Zurich North America

by Sharon Baker

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

Finding top talent is a key challenge in any IT organization. For Zurich North America, whose parent company Zurich Financial Services recently outsourced application development and maintenance for all of its business units worldwide, it is the number-one challenge, according to CIO Andy Maier.

“We need to make potential employees aware our group still is making huge investments in our IT capabilities to develop a future-state IT platform within the next three to four years,” Maier says. “Our company continues to be attractive to those professionals in the market who are more solution oriented.”

The rationale behind outsourcing im-plementation projects to CSC and IBM, Maier explains, was to allow the Swiss-based company's global IT operations to focus their efforts on core insurance business issues rather than specialized technology areas. “You can't afford to keep a specialist in so many different technology areas anymore,” he says. Zurich Financial Services has retained all key business-oriented IT positions, though, and IT professionals continue to run proj-ects, analyses, and user acceptance testing in-house.

Moving to an enterprisewide IT outsourcing strategy has changed Maier's role as CIO. Instead of managing all elements of the value chain on his own, he now sources certain parts to the company's strategic suppliers, a shift that required Maier to include supply and management skills in his talent base.

Headquartered in Schaumburg, Ill., Zurich North America sells commercial property/casualty insurance to corporate, middle market, and small businesses. Zurich North America employs 9,000 people and had $15.5 billion in revenue in 2004. Maier's IT group employs about 400 people. An additional 350 workers are on the outsourcers' payroll.

A native of Switzerland, Maier's career in technology began as a software developer and project manager in research and development. In 2003, Maier signed on with Zurich Financial Services as head of its shared application service provider organization in Europe. A year later, he became CIO of the company's global life business division. In mid-2005, Maier moved to the U.S. to work as CIO at Zurich North America. He indicates his new position offers him an intercultural experience and the challenge of leading a large North American IT organization through a growth phase.

“The speed of change and the opportunities come faster here, so there's more of a challenge in time to market than in Europe,” he says.

For Zurich's North American IT organization, those changes include supporting strategic initiatives that focus on cost correlation, distribution management, and customer relationship management. Maier also expects to install best-of-class automated underwriting expert systems, rules engines, and business intelligence systems within the next few years.

“We are transforming our IT operating model into an international platform that is aligned to insurance processes over several business areas,” he notes. “Overall, we are looking for a boost in business benefit with tighter integration of our applications and data across the value chain.”

Moving business units away from a silo environment to a more strategic horizontal platform supplies plenty of opportunities for growth for IT professionals, Maier points out.

“Such an integrated environment offers our IT folks an enterprisewide skill set rather than a particular specialization in one area,” he says.

At work, Maier relies on two devices to perform his job responsibilities–his laptop and his BlackBerry, which doubles as a cell phone. At home, he would rather spend time with his family than use any type of automated equipment and has no hobbies that rely on technology.

Regarding future technologies, Maier suggests wireless capabilities will bring companies tremendous opportunities, particularly in distribution. “Such technology can play a critical role in providing better, faster, and more accurate information to our distributors about potential and current customers,” he says.

Information analytics is another key technology that can help companies improve their competitive advantage. “Technologies for business intelligence and data mining will be crucial for customer distribution management and better risk management,” Maier predicts, “not only to provide informational insight to managers but also to give distributors real-time data at the point of sale.”

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

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Andy Maier, Zurich North America

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