'The CIO should get the right technology to support his CEO's biz direction'

Having joined Guardian Life in 2000, his staff today numbers over 400 people,

with IT and facilities' budgets of more than $100 mn and $35 mn, respectively.

Reporting to the CEO, his responsibilities include IT, e-business, facilities,

corporate security and business process outsourcing. He is also on Guardian's

Risk Committee and Product Sub-Committee.

Callahan was recognized by Computerworld as one of the Premier 100 IT

executives, chosen from across all industries, for 2003. Also, under his

stewardship, Guardian Life was awarded CIO Magazine's 2004 Enterprise Value

Award in the financial services industry category. In a career spanning 30

years, he has been involved in senior positions in various organizations like

AIG, Wellington Management Co and Goldman Sachs. He spoke to Rajneesh De of

Dataquest on the evolving role of CIO.

On challenges in transition from legacy to new systems

The first challenge is to make a proper business case for the new system. It

is not only about convincing the top management and all other stakeholders, but

CIOs need to ensure that the case should allow for new products to be developed

faster and, more importantly, cheaper. The second challenge is in changing and

managing this transition. All of it should not be attempted at one go; CIOs need

to execute in multiple phases, for each product and each legacy system.

On CIO deliverables to the CEO



The foremost objective for the CIO is getting the appropriate technology in

place to support the CEO's business direction. Next would be to identify

opportunities for businesses that may arise out of new technologies. And the

third, but often-overlooked, aspect is the regulatory compliance that may

otherwise hamper business operations.

On standardization of technologies in an organization



Ultimately, adoption of technologies in an organization spread across

multiple geographies, would depend on local business requirements. However,

Guardian Life is heavily oriented towards standardization across our three

'regional home offices'. Probably having 147 business units in multiple

locations, but all inside the US, have helped in this endeavor. Wherever there

is a differentiation, it has been influenced more by local business parameters.

On outsourcing of infrastructure and business processes



Guardian Life has outsourced its helpdesk function and PC deployment to a

Siemens' subsidiary in the US, but not the mission critical business processes.

Some of our application development and maintenance are also outsourced to Patni

in India. We are very conservative about what data and business details of ours

go offshore. Though outsourcing to India is happening already, India needs to

have a regulatory environment similar to that in the US, for the offshoring to

increase in quantum.

On adoption of emerging technologies at Guardian Life



First and foremost is the plan to implement SOA that is geared towards

re-use and quicker implementation thereby leading to 30% reduction in time and

cost of developing new systems. Then we have plans for enterprise content

management, but more interesting is the project to have a common wireless

front-end that would automate the entire insurance process from application to

policy finalization. This front-end would include different technologies like

wireless, biometrics and electronic signatures. We are also implementing

Teradata data warehouse with BI analysis tools from Business Objects.For

actuarial analytics, we are using MGL Alfa tools and also investing in hedging

analytics.