NYL’s Sanders Drives Change

If change can be difficult, then driving transformation within a 1,200-strong IT organization in which employees have an average tenure of more than 22 years must really be a challenge. That observation hasn't escaped Mark Sanders, whom New York-based New York Life ($855 million in 2005 net income) has chosen to play a major transformative role as CTO and senior vice president of its Corporate Information department.

But Sanders has been through such change before. "I was involved in major cultural transitions both at Salomon Brothers beginning in the late 1980s and at Merrill Lynch in the mid to late 1990s; and both of those were in support of distributed technology," he relates.

As head of New York Life's enterprise architecture and engineering division within corporate IT, Sanders says, his primary responsibility is to develop a technology vision and road map for the carrier. "I'm building a five- to seven-year technology strategy that aligns with the business strategy today," he says. "I expect that to be formalized by the end of the year."

Sanders' second major objective is what he calls the alignment of IT's professional services to improve the delivery of technology products and services. Toward that end, he says, his division will be one point of a collaborative "triangle," working with the service delivery and business application management division.

--Anthony O'Donnell

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