Progressive Insurance is well Progressive

If there is ever any doubt as to just how innovative Progressive Insurance has been from a technology standpoint over the past decade or so, just ask the Mayfield Village, Ohio-based carrier's CIO, Raymond Voelker, about the IT organization's stance on buy versus build. "Many times in our history, things that we wanted to deploy were not available on the market to be bought," Voelker explains. "So we focused on building in order to get to market first."

Clearly, and for some time now, Progressive's technology operation and, by extension, the company as a whole have been ahead of the curve a trend that started under Voelker's predecessor and past Elite 8 honoree, Glenn Renwick. And just as Renwick who has since become the company's chief executive set Progressive's technology operation ahead of the curve, it has been Voelker who has kept the company there.

In response Voelker is leading Progressive on a new technology directive, and the virtues of invention and innovation have been joined by enterprise consistency and capacity. In other words, now that Progressive is an industry leader, it has become Voelker's responsibility to make sure that the IT team has not only the talent to continue to be innovative, but the necessary capacity to support a larger and more complex organization than the one he joined more than 20 years ago. "A lot of what we're doing is making sure our processes have kept pace with our size so that we can still maintain our style but do things more efficiently than we have in the past," Voelker says.

In 2001, for instance, Voelker oversaw the creation of a fault-tolerant data center in Cleveland. Then in 2007 the insurer opened a Colorado Springs, Colo., location that is totally dedicated to technology assets. "Now we're in a place where we have two production data centers [and] two development centers," Voelker says of the Cleveland and Colorado Springs locales. "We're able to keep our systems running between those data centers. We do not need a third party to help us with disaster recovery or business continuity of our systems."

In addition to those large data center projects, Voelker also points to the implementation of a new billing system two years ago as a major accomplishment. The modern, real-time system from CSC (Austin, Texas) replaced a legacy application.

While Voelker and his team are determined to invest in technology that will keep Progressive on the cutting edge, he is also working to transform the carrier's current environment which includes IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) mainframes, some client/server architecture with Microsoft (Redmond, Wash.) .NET and C# programming languages, as well as Web applications to compete in the coming decades. With that business case in mind, Voelker says, Progressive is "very close" to rolling out Policy Pro, a new policy administration system that was built in-house. The old policy admin system, he adds, was built decades ago but still functions well. "[But] it was not designed for an Internet-enabled world," Voelker explains.

The insurer is also updating its in-the-field claims technology to improve efficiency and bring the claims process in step with the organization's stance on green issues, according to Voelker. "Much of our claims process has been technology-focused for several years, and we've provided tools to the claims adjusters in the field," he says. "However, there is a degree of paper out there in the claims resolution process."

Voelker describes the project as an "electronic file folder for claims" and says that the initiative does not involve equipping field adjusters with more mobile technology. The field force, he notes, has been working with wirelessly enabled laptops since the mid-1990s. "More mobile technology is not the way I would put it," Voelker says. "Options around connectivity and computing platform diversity and strength have changed dramatically between 1995 and now, and so it's more a matter of taking advantage of those core technology enhancements and capabilities as opposed to putting more mobile technology in the field."

As the policy admin and paperless claims projects not to mention other initiatives such as moving to a converged VOIP environment move forward, Voelker has sought to establish a new culture around technology at Progressive as a way to cultivate the innovative thinking and entrepreneurial spirit that has pervaded the carrier's recent past while still supporting a company that has become one of the country's largest insurers, with more than $14 billion in annual premium.

What has changed at Progressive, it seems, is scope. Previously, Voelker recalls, many problems within the IT organization could be addressed by bringing four senior leaders into a room. That worked fine back when the carrier had an IT staff of 200. Now, with an operation up around 3,500 and with so many more customers connected to the carrier's systems, such small-scale problem management is insufficient. In response Voelker has established an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process culture at Progressive that promotes enterprise consistency and strategy. ITIL is a framework of IT best practices that stresses the importance of business value and the process life cycle.



Select your State to get accurate quotes