The Automated Exec

Chu is senior vice president, eBusi-ness & Technology, for The Hartford Financial Services Groupand thats a big group. Property/casualty insurance accounts for about $9 billion in premium out of The Hartfords $19 billion total revenue. It also includes some 18,000 of The Hartfords 30,000 worldwide employees, of whom about 2,500 report up to Chu.

When I joined The Hartford in 1999, it had a five-company model, and personal lines was one of those five companies. I joined personal lines to create and lead a strategy for business development, Chu says. I moved up to CFO of personal lines and was leading a major IT effort at the time, so I was given responsibility for the rest of personal lines IT, as well.

Before joining The Hartford, Chu held the position of managing consultant for Tillinghast-Towers Perrin, dealing both externally with direct clients and internally with staff management. Earlier, he held several executive-level positions with PepsiCo, including director for PepsiCos Asia-Pacific operations, and was vice president with Lehman Brothers Asia Holdings. Chu holds both a BA degree in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and an MBA degree from the Stern School of Business at New York University.

As he describes it, The Hartfords personal lines area alone had five main product lines requiring IT support, and commercial lines had even more. They will continue to have different business needs we have to satisfy, of course, but theres no reason they need to have different testing methodologies, he notes, giving one specific example. When The Hartford switched from the five-company model and property/casualty moved to a shared-services model, IT became a shared service, reporting directly to the president of property/casualty. In December 2003, Chu stepped up to his current position.

Our IT transformation proj- ect marries up nicely with the P&C divisions goals, such as improving services, reducing costs, building out business capabilitywhich has a high degree of IT flavor. The P&C IT organization had multiple ways of design, testing, proj-ect management, etc., Chu explains, which ended up with tremendous amounts of variation. Going to a shared-services model gives The Hartford the opportunity to improve all these operations. We still can give our various business units the unique support they need, but rationalizing our operations to provide more uniform methods of design, implementation, and testing, for example, allows us to improve greatly these operations. As the company passed the one-year mark of this three- to four-year project, he says the project is farther ahead and doing better than he originally had hoped. Chu points out this work all has to be done while supporting all of the very large and active business units and continuing to deliver on current IT projects in development. Its like changing a tire on a car while its going full-speed ahead on the highway.

Even though the demands of his job are unique in many ways, Chus choice of tools to stay on top of his work are fairly standard. On the business side, I use the same tools, such as my PC and BlackBerry, that others use, but I really like to play with technology at home. I particularly like the gadgets, he admits. I like sports, especially golf and tennis, and Im always attracted to the technological gadgets that come out for them. As an example, he recently purchased and started playing with the new R7 Quad driver from TaylorMade, which contains weighted screws that can be adjusted to modify the clubs center of gravity to offset (theoretically, at least) things such as hooks and slices. He also treated himself to a GPS system in his car.

Im particularly fascinated with the convergence thats happening in the homewith PCs, sound systems, and the increasing ability to control your house with your PC.
Given the massive shared-services project at The Hartford, convergence seems to have its role and allure at the office, too.