Im a Fighting Gamecock from South Carolina, says Catherine Brune proudly, expressing her allegiance to her alma mater, the University of South Carolina. If she is an example of the Fighting Gamecocks, they obviously have a lot of spunk, a quality that comes in handy as a member of the senior management team for one of the worlds largest insurance and financial institutions.
Brune is the chief technology officer of Allstate Insurance Group, the $26 billion insurance giant everyone knows as the Good Hands people. As CTO, she is Allstates top IT person. We dont have a CIO, she explains. Well, we do, but hes our chief investment officer.
Allstate used to have a chief information officer. When he retired a year ago and Brune stepped into his role, she and the top management team decided it would be a good time to overhaul the IT organization.
Im responsible for all of the infrastructure for the company, she says, but the business units are the owners of their respective applications. This means, for example, a policy processing system would belong to the specific primary carrier that uses it, but IT is responsible for the platform it runs on. Many of the people who report to me with respect to infrastructure actually are employees of the operating units, she continues. But even with dual reporting, she says it gives the operating units more control over their destiny.
Brunes IT department does own all of the general corporate applications, such as Allstates human resource systems, general ledger, and the like. Nevertheless, she describes a few exceptions to these rules, along with a reason for each. In short, she explains, Allstate figured out what would work best as opposed to what looked the cleanest on the organizational chart. Overall, she directly or indirectly is responsible for more than 6,000 of Allstates 40,000 employees.
After graduating from USC, Brune had a short stint in marketing for a retail company before joining Allstate in 1976. Since then, shes moved 11 times with the company and occupied many positions along the way. If you dont sit in a lot of chairs during a 27-year career, then shame on you, right? she asks. Brune credits one of her early positions, in which she had to learn to rate all the various policies Allstate writes, for giving her the solid grounding in insurance that has stood her in such good stead as she moved up the ladder.
Were doing some exciting things here at Allstate, and one of the biggest is were componentizing many of our legacy systems, she says. Allstate is dividing systems into a presentation layer, a business rules layer, and a database layer. Being able to reuse existing components is saving us millions of dollars in development costs, she continues. Basically, Allstate is turning older legacy mainframe systems into new-technology, n-tiered architecture, without having to replace heavily embedded systems. It also dramatically cuts down on our development times, she points out.
Brune credits ACORD XML standards for having a major impact on these projects. It turns out Allstate was introduced to ACORD and its standards when it purchased its Encompass subsidiary. We sort of snuck in the back door, she adds.
So what kind of automation does Brune herself use? Anything that will save me a minute or more of time, she says. Primarily she uses her trusty IBM Thinkpad, although she recently participated on the Allstate team that tested the HP iPAQ (other teams tested other units, such as the BlackBerry). I still have it, but, she adds, she regularly deals with large documents that dont play well on the smaller iPAQ unit.
At home, she has a wireless network, two PCs for herself and her husband, and one each for her two munchkins. They also have broadband, of course. As for her personal technology plans for the future: Im going to invent an automated box I can step into in the morning, she confides. It will dress me, do my hair, and apply my makeup, all in five minutes. Im going to market it and make millions.
Just an example of the spirit of a Fighting Gamecock from South Carolina.
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