Quelle: CIO USA

The austere bell-and-clock tower in which MetLife makes its home inManhattan has been dwarfed by other skyscrapers since its completionin 1909, but it remains a monument in the Madison Square Park area. Itlooms as a symbol of the nation's second largest insurer, with $2.1trillion worth of insurance in force.

Last year, the MetLife companies served 9 million U.S. households, 4.1million customers abroad, and 64,000 companies and institutions. Ithas 46,154 employees, and last year it amassed $32.5 billion inoperating revenue. On the technology front, the company has five CIOs,one CTO and an executive vice president of technology who overseesthem all. During its 134-year history, CIO-100 honoree MetLife hasgrown not only in size but also in complexity, becoming so broad thatChuck Johnston, vice president of insurance information strategies atStamford, Conn.-based Meta Group, describes it as the "GE of theinsurance industry."

Much of MetLife's scale is the result of its aggressive acquisitionstrategy - it has bought everything from billion-dollar enterprises todistribution channels across all its lines of business. Because of itsrapid expansion, MetLife was saddled with a plethora of disparatesystems and processes - in addition to its own legacy systems, somealready decades old. In 1998, a new CEO, Robert H. Benmosche, came onboard looking to transform the company's reputation as a staidinsurance company to that of a nimble, full-service financial servicesfirm. To that end, he had MetLife look at its millions of customersfrom an enterprisewide perspective and start taking advantage of itsenormity to cut expenses. At the same time, MetLife executives decidedto take the company public, meaning it needed to respond topublic-reporting requirements dictated by the Securities and ExchangeCommission. All these changes meant one thing for MetLife's technologyteam - it was time to get integrated.

Daniel J. Cavanagh knew big changes were ahead when he took over asexecutive vice president in charge of operations and informationtechnology in March 1999. Appointed by Benmosche, he was given a $990million budget. "We knew we were going public in a year. And we knewwe were doing it very rapidly," Cavanagh says. "So no one was taken bysurprise."