Next, Fechtmann created a rollout plan. First was the MetLife company,or Mother Met as Fechtmann calls it, which was converted in April.Several smaller subsidiaries moved over in May, and several midsizesubsidiaries, such as MetLife Securities, in June. MetLife Auto andHome is slated for the third quarter. After that come the largeracquisitions - New England Financial and General AmericanFinancial - in thefourth quarter, where there is sure to be a "fair amount of pain,"says Fechtmann.

Fechtmann and the committee allow no more than 5 percent customizationof code - a conservative choice based on a lesson learned the hard way.Five years earlier, one of her predecessors had implemented thePeopleSoft HR system with more than 40 percent customization. "Everyyear, there are patches and upgrades," says Fechtmann. She is"painfully de-customizing" the PeopleSoft platform (working withconsultants from KPMG Consulting and outsourcer Cognizant) to upgradeto version 8.3.

After the vendor, rollout and customization choices came the hardpart. Every Thursday, Fechtmann flew to Tampa to foster a closeworking relationship with her business partner, MetLife's comptroller,and representatives from Met's subsidiaries. "There would be painfulmeetings where we would do account mapping," Fechtmann, a formeraccountant, recalls with a grimace. "New England Financial'scomptroller would say, 'We have 500 general ledger accounts, and thisis how we normally post our stuff.' MetLife's comptroller would say,'Well, we do it this way."

The IT governance board came to the consensus that decisions such asthose would be made based on the greatest overall benefit, rather thansimply going the MetLife way. "We weren't going to say, 'Well, this isthe way we do it, and you have to comply," says Fechtmann. "So wewent account by account and figured out how we were going to do it.[We] really had to reengineer the business processes. [We] were reallytrying to define a new model of how to do business."

The process was tedious and troublesome. "You run into both businessprocess angst and, quite frankly, cultural angst," Fechtmann explains."Old habits die hard. People say, 'Well, this is the way we've alwaysdone it,' and change can be difficult." Add to that the impending lossof jobs in subsidiaries that had their own accounting departments(that work would soon be centralized within MetLife), and the tensiongrew. "It became much more a job of using your influencing skills toget everyone to figure out the best way to do things going forward,"she says. "The good thing was that we had a really great partnershipbetween IT and the business. I know that can sound like a cliché, butI mean it sincerely. That's how we got through it."