Guilmette Serves Customers

In response to broker and end-customer demand, The Hartford's (Hartford, $18.7 billion 2003 revenues) Investment Products Division (IPD) restructured its business and IT to bring the formerly separate retail and group/institutional segments under one roof. To lead a new shared technology group, which includes e-business, output, EDI and information delivery, IPD promoted Bob Guilmette to vice president. Guilmette was previously IPD's assistant vice president for customer and distributor information technology.

Guilmette will support IPD's seven lines of business with customer-facing technology, and run an internal consultancy driving architecture, database management and the design of IPD's application portfolio.

Guilmette will be busy with a host of projects, including those supporting changes in call center and output technologies, both paper-driven and online, he says. "Those two areas are changing substantially," he remarks. "We also have ahead of us a data warehousing initiative, an information delivery strategy effort and an architecture initiative, where we're pulling one view of customer and broker together across our seven disparate product lines so that we can get better analytics on who is selling, who is not, and why."

Guilmette says his team will face a challenge to exceed customers' expectations. "But, on top of that, we have to innovate, drive costs down and increase value," he comments.

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio