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Interview: Dr. Clark M. Sykes, Vice President - Information Technology, Merchants Insurance Companies. |
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How is the role of the CIO evolving? As a CIO, what do you use as your own measure of success? The CIO's role has become much more integral to corporate business strategy. In many organizations, the CIO has a seat at the senior management table, and a voice in setting business strategy and defining how technology can be used as an enabler of that strategy. In my mind, success is measured by how well technology fulfills its role as a strategic enabler, and our internal and external customers' satisfaction with the products and services delivered. How has the role of IT organization changed in the last 5 years at Merchants Insurance? IT's role at Merchants has become more central and critical to the company's overall operation, and to delivery of its key business strategies. We have worked to develop greater depth within IT in knowledge of each of the company's key disciplines – underwriting, claims, and finance, and have organized the development organization around these disciplines. This has led to a greater level of collaboration between IT staff and their business colleagues. How well have the Insurance Industry in general, and Merchants Insurance in specific, adopted emerging technologies? In general, I think the insurance industry has been comparatively slow in adopting new technologies; I certainly wouldn't say that we are "early adopters". Some of the reasons for this are because of the complexity of insurance operations (there are myriad rules, forms, and heavy regulation), and because of the existing heavy investments in legacy infrastructures. This makes it relatively difficult both to add emerging technologies to this base, and to migrate or convert to new platforms. In the traditional systems development lifecycle, business gives ‘requirements’ for a system and IT ‘implements the requirements’. Today, business cannot adequately forecast requirements because they cannot always predict everything in a volatile market. Also, they cannot predict the delivery capability of the IT organization. How is this problem being addressed by internal IT organizations? Having an agile organization that's open to changing conditions and opportunities is critical to any business success. While flexibility is important, equally important if not more so is having the proper processes and procedures to manage change – things such as an explicit and well-defined change control process. This is not rocket science but just good, basic business practice. Without such processes in place, chaos reigns and a lot of misdirected and wasted effort is the result. What are the main attributes that you look for while selecting a business partner? I look for technological, industry, or specific application expertise (e.g. imaging or workflow), combined with a well developed and proven implementation methodology. What do you think is the future of global software development model? Do you foresee any threat to this model? If by "global software model" you mean greater utilization of offshore resources to bring new systems online or maintain existing systems, then I think the trend will continue. However, as offshore companies continue to grow and to expand in size, I also think the current economic advantages to their U.S. and European based clients will be less apparent. Merchants has had good experience with offshore development teams, and we have enjoyed some financial advantages as a result. However, offshore work also has its challenges, such as coordination and communication between widely disparate organizations. What are your views on India as offshore destination hub for software development? It is an understatement to say that India plays a critical role in offshore software development; indeed, India pioneered the concept. India is respected world wide as a growing technological power, and produces some of the best educated and most capable software engineers in the world today. |
