Shortly after Thad DeBerry joined Western World Insurance Group as vice president of IT five years ago, he began losing sleep over one issue: the company’s lack of a business continuity plan. “When I first arrived, there were some basic issues we needed to tackle,” DeBerry says. “One of the first things we did was to develop a plan that could keep the business running in the event of a disaster.”
Western World offers commercial insurance products through agents and brokers. The company, which has about 225 employees, had net written premiums of $263 million in 2007. DeBerry supervises 18 IT professionals and 35 operations/administrative staff. The carrier outsources development and processing work in India and Sri Lanka.
A key component of DeBerry’s business continuity plan was implementing document management and workflow systems. “Prior to implementing ImageRight, we had a number of typical issues surrounding paper-based organizations,” he says. “Having one copy of a file was a significant impediment to the timeliness of our customer service and our claims handling process, and we were exposed to any type of disaster.”
With ImageRight, Western World’s underwriting and claims departments use an integrated workflow infrastructure that provides real-time access to critical information. The system streamlined the company’s customer service capabilities and improved its claims handling processes. The vendor product also allowed the insurer to develop a comprehensive business continuity plan that incorporates all of its images and workflow capabilities.
With those systems firmly in place, DeBerry and his team are focusing on improving ease of use, implementing new products and functionality, and further advancing the company’s infrastructure.
“Our focus now is to use technology as a competitive tool and really enhance how we appear to the market, how we work with our customers, and how we help, from a technology perspective, to retain and acquire new customers,” DeBerry says.
To that end, the IT department is using Microsoft .NET technology to boost its processing capabilities and improve how its agent portal distributes information. The company also is quickly implementing tools to provide additional functionality to its underwriting guideline applications and rate/quote/bind tools as well as incrementally upgrading legacy systems to allow for more rapid product introduction.
In addition, DeBerry is focusing on strengthening Western World’s infrastructure with server virtualization and data storage/retrieval tools. “As our application environment continues to expand, the data center’s capacity must be able to keep up in an efficient and reliable manner,” he explains. “Through virtualization and enhanced data storage methods, we’ll be able to provide a stable, yet flexible, infrastructure for a dynamic information processing environment.”
DeBerry took on various IT-related roles at several companies before joining Reliance National Insurance Co. in 1991 as a manager in actuarial systems. DeBerry worked there for nine years, moving up to vice president of the department. “Working with actuarial personnel gave me incredible insight into how the business worked,” DeBerry says. “It was an invaluable experience.”
DeBerry then joined Everest National Insurance Co. as vice president of IT for three years before going to Western World in 2003. He was promoted to senior vice president of IT in 2006.
With top-priority projects completed or in progress, DeBerry has a new issue—succession planning—on his mind. “IT leadership is a role that is changing rapidly and requires an individual to have a very diverse set of skills,” he says. “You have great technical people who are not as focused on the overall business picture as they could be, making it difficult for them to move into leadership positions. I think this is an issue throughout the industry.”
To address this, DeBerry is instituting a training program at Western World that allows IT staff to work closely with underwriters and other personnel to better understand the insurance business. “The next level of IT insurance leaders is going to be a different breed, and we need to be better prepared,” he contends. “Having a deep understanding of the industry will be key.”