Guardian Life’s Sguerra Promoted to CTO

Jaime Sguerra's tenure as 2nd VP, chief architect of Guardian Life Ins. Co. of America has been a productive one. Sguerra played a key role in a multi-year initiative to develop a services-oriented architecture supporting real-time applications and driving efficiencies that are saving the company approximately $13 million annually. He also drove a straight-through processing initiative for policy underwriting in support of the carrier's individual business. "We took a process that would take upwards of 27 days and brought it down to the teens," he says. "The quality of the applications has gone up, the number of days it takes for a policy to be issued has come down, and overall it is a much more effective process."

As CTO Sguerra has taken on management of Guardian's enterprise information management group, which comprises all the company's data assets and functions, and the carrier's messaging group, which manages e-mail and PDA communications.

Sguerra's strategic objective as CTO will be to develop a vision for technology use that joins application development and infrastructure within the framework of enterprise architecture. "I've been asked to take what we did in enterprise architecture and bring it up a level with a plan to define the use of technology on the infrastructure side," Sguerra explains. The objective is, he adds, "to come up with a road map for a secure and scalable infrastructure that deals with the legacy application environment and that includes all data management needs."

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