GMAC Insurance Personal Lines Jerry Filler
BY SHARON BAKER
Jerry Filler and his 400-member IT department, in partnership with the business organization and a project management office, are in the middle of an ambitious series of projects to merge multiple policy management systems into a single system. Although the projects are on track, Filler is not yet ready to celebrate.
The jurys still out on whether well be successful, he says. We feel good about what weve accomplished so far, but we really cant claim victory yet.
Filler, CIO, information systems and services, at GMAC Insurance Personal Lines in St. Louis, has reason to feel confident, however. The policy systems projects, which began in 2002 and are scheduled for completion by early 2007, actually are the second phase of an infrastructure consolidation project. The first phase merged multiple claims systems into one system and was completed in early 2004. That merged system helped GMAC move its claims processing to a paperless environment, Filler says, and has been well received by field representatives.
GMAC Insurance Personal Lines offers auto, recreational, and homeowner insurance. With more than $1.4 billion in annual written premiums, the company is one of the largest underwriters of personal lines insurance in the United States. A wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors Corporation, GMAC Insurance Personal Lines has corporate offices in St. Louis, Atlanta, and Winston-Salem, N.C., with additional operations and staff in Jacksonville, Fla., Albany, N.Y., Detroit, and Ontario. The company employs more than 2,700 people and services customers in 48 states.
Filler earned his bachelors degree in business administration from the Univer-sity of Florida in Gainesville. After college, he spent 10 years in various positions at both the individual contributor and management level at Newport News Shipbuilding in southern Virginia and General Electric in Cleveland. At Newport News Shipbuilding, Filler developed and supported systems that helped the company build aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines for the U.S. Navy.
Entering the insurance industry in 1988, Filler began as a technical services manager at Progressive Insurance in Cleveland, where he handled system programming and administration tasks for mainframes, Unix, and Windows servers. After working his way up the management ranks to IT executive for computer operations, he left to join GMAC Insurance Personal Lines in 2001 as an enterprise architect and became CIO in April 2002.
Filler joined GMAC to offer the company architectural guidance and help integrate its multiple IT entities (as a result of several mergers) into one. The organization ran from both a business and IT perspective as multiple business units. I was brought in to try to bring some thought around what we should be doing and what kind of systems we should have going forward, he says.
The claims systems consolidation already was under way when Filler came on board, so he set his sights on merging the companys three policy systems into one. These systems support GMAC In-surance Personal Lines three distribution channelsthe direct channel, the Internet, and its independent agents. Filler chose one of the original three homegrown systems for his future integrated system and is in the process of adding capabilities such as Web services, XML messaging, and a services-oriented architecture to address the companys future needs. The three-tiered Java-based system runs on a browser in a client-server environment and includes a midrange Unix component and mainframe. He plans to migrate to a relational database, either DB2 or Oracle, in the future.
Filler expects the integrated system to be capable of supporting any business model GMAC Insurance Personal Lines wants to adopt (which he freely admits requires a fair amount of flexibility) as well as be primarily maintained by the business, rather than the IT department. I want a system that gets IT out of maintenance and into future development, he says. The more we maintain systems, the less time we have to add value to the business.
The single policy system currently is operating in 16 states in the direct channel distribution environment and in one state in the Internet channel. Filler plans to bring the system live in the independent agent channel in one state in May.
Once it is fully operational in 48 states, the integrated policy system should help GMAC Insurance Personal Lines reduce training costs, increase productivity, and improve customer service. We expect to be able to service our customers much better than we can today, Filler says.
At that point, Filler and his team are likely to have plenty of reasons to celebrate.
is a freelance business writer based in Charlotte, N.C.
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