Nordlin Drives Alignment

Farmers Insurance (Los Angeles) will place a strategic emphasis on growth this year, according to Markus Nordlin, who became the company's CIO in August. To support that goal, Nordlin is focusing on enhancing IT and business alignment. "In the middle of last year, I drove our strategic information systems plan, and now we're going to dust that off again," he says. "We'll be focusing on that for the next couple of months, and there will probably be some changes in the organization."

Among Nordlin's top priorities are product enhancement initiatives and tool implementations to support growth through the carrier's Farmers and Foremost brands. He also will be busy carrying out corporate-mandated initiatives, such as parent company Zurich Financial Services' (Zurich; $2.12 billion net 2003 income) global ASP outsourcing contract with CSC (Austin, Texas). "Internally, I'll be focusing on driving a successful implementation of the CSC outsourcing program, as well as continued implementation of our IBM [Armonk, N.Y.] desktop outsourcing, which began last year," Nordlin comments.