Voelker Keeps Progressive on Cutting Edge

Progressive Insurance's Ray Voelker, an Elite 8 honoree, seeks to keep the carrier one step ahead of the competition by ramping up capacity and cultivating the IT team's innovative nature.

If there is ever any doubt as to just how innovative Progressive Insurance has been from a technology standpoint over the past decade or so, just ask the Mayfield Village, Ohio-based carrier's CIO, Raymond Voelker, about the IT organization's stance on buy versus build. "Many times in our history, things that we wanted to deploy were not available on the market to be bought," Voelker explains. "So we focused on building in order to get to market first."

Clearly, and for some time now, Progressive's technology operation and, by extension, the company as a whole have been ahead of the curve — a trend that started under Voelker's predecessor and past Elite 8 honoree, Glenn Renwick. And just as Renwick -- who has since become the company's chief executive — set Progressive's technology operation ahead of the curve, it has been Voelker who has kept the company there.

Still, the insurance industry has done quite a good job of playing catch-up, so some of the innovative technologies and strategies that have set Progressive apart are becoming more commonplace. "For most of my tenure here, 'invent' was clearly the way to go," says Voelker, who started with the company in 1985 and has been CIO since 2000. " 'Invent' continues to be important, but so now does 'adopt and adapt.' I see things now that we were able to do in 1998 that very few other companies could do. Some of those same things you [can] buy pretty much anywhere today."

In response Voelker is leading Progressive on a new technology directive, and the virtues of invention and innovation have been joined by enterprise consistency and capacity. In other words, now that Progressive is an industry leader, it has become Voelker's responsibility to make sure that the IT team has not only the talent to continue to be innovative, but the necessary capacity to support a larger and more complex organization than the one he joined more than 20 years ago. "A lot of what we're doing is making sure our processes have kept pace with our size so that we can still maintain our style but do things more efficiently than we have in the past," Voelker says.

In 2001, for instance, Voelker oversaw the creation of a fault-tolerant data center in Cleveland. Then in 2007 the insurer opened a Colorado Springs, Colo., location that is totally dedicated to technology assets. "Now we're in a place where we have two production data centers [and] two development centers," Voelker says of the Cleveland and Colorado Springs locales. "We're able to keep our systems running between those data centers. We do not need a third party to help us with disaster recovery or business continuity of our systems."

In addition to those large data center projects, Voelker also points to the implementation of a new billing system two years ago as a major accomplishment. The modern, real-time system from CSC (Austin, Texas) replaced a legacy application.