A clean slate: working on a platform free of legacy systems provides opportunities for this CIO.

Greg Ricker was handed a golden opportunity when he joined Strickland Insurance Group a little more than 10 years ago.

At the time, the Goldsboro, N.C.-based commercial lines carrier was selling its nonstandard personal auto portfolio and starting new initiatives to expand its commercial P&C and brokerage businesses. The move also signaled big changes in IT.

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"The beauty of this opportunity was that much of the company's IT infrastructure and applications were being sold, as well, so the technology platform was going to be completely replaced in the coming years," Ricker explains. "This meant there would be no legacy systems. We were moving to a pure, Windows-based platform, with object-oriented programming and real-time relational databases. This was a dream for anybody in IT."

Working with a new platform gave Ricker and his 20-member IT team the freedom to design and implement systems without worrying about how they would support or interact with a legacy platform. Ricker, who joined Strickland in 1999 and became CIO in 2002, used this freedom to help the company automate and streamline its insurance processing and brokerage operations and move toward straight-through processing.

For example, in 2002, Ricker's team began implementing an imaging workflow process and rules-based processing solution to upload and process data electronically. The solution is a combination of vendor systems such as the ImageRight content management and workflow system and tools developed in-house.

"There is no one solution that does it all, so we've taken the approach of buying best-of-breed components and adding value internally to put them all together and make them work," he says.

First implemented in underwriting, the imaging solution subsequently was rolled out to all Strickland departments. Now, Ricker and his IT team are focusing on integrating the workflow process with the company's Web rating system to further improve efficiency and create a seamless data flow.

"We have a pretty robust Web site our general agents use, and we're continuing to add functionality to that," he says. "But agents are sending the message loud and clear they don't want everything they do to be on carrier-specific Web sites."

To address that issue, Ricker's team is expanding the company's Web services to allow agents to rate more classes and download policies and claims.

"We're seeing some great benefits from the additional mining of our data," Ricker says. "Right now, we rely on third parties, particularly our reinsurance partners, to do a lot of modeling and some predictive analysis. We're looking at doing more of that ourselves in the future."

As part of a relatively small company--Strickland has about 100 employees--Ricker acknowledges the current economy has caused IT to shift priorities and sharpen its focus to further support sales and help agents control expenses.

"Our main business challenge is to continue to react and respond to this market cycle," he comments. "We're in unprecedented times, and some of what has worked before isn't working now. We have to be disciplined in how we price our products, and IT helps support that. We're spending more time now on project priorities than ever before to make sure we're doing the right projects at the right time."

Ricker, who has more than 20 years of experience in IT, started his career as a programmer at Nationwide Group.

"At the time, Nationwide was in the early stages of deploying its agency automation systems, so I had the opportunity to work on multiple technology platforms from mainframes to telecommunications to mini-computing using a number of application development environments," he says.

He recently had a chance to reflect on his career when he spoke to a graduating business class at a local college and advised those interested in insurance IT to learn the business and truly understand the data they work with.

"When I started my first job as a programmer, I didn't know where it was going to take me," he says. "But the more I learned about insurance, the more I liked it. Business units become dependent on IT systems and their functionality. Business leaders constantly are looking for ways to improve their processes, and we're at the heart of it all."

Greg Ricker

Strickland Insurance Group

CIO

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