Guardian Promotes Sguerra

As second VP, chief architect of Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, Jaime Sguerra played a key role in developing a service-oriented architecture to support 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," Sguerra 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 more-effective process."

As Guardian's newly appointed CTO, Sguerra will oversee the enterprise information management group, which includes the company's data assets and functions, and the messaging group, which manages e-mail and PDA communications. He says his strategic objective is to develop a vision for technology 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, in order "to come up with a road map for a secure and scalable infrastructure that deals with the legacy application environment and 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