John Kellington, Senior VP and CIO at The Cincinnati Insurance Companies

How do you ensure that IT line managers are involved in strategic IT planning?   

“We want to have a collective vision. We ask, ‘what do we want Cincinnati Insurance to look like and work like five years in the future?’ We describe how we want the systems to work and how we want the insurance industry to work, to the extent that we can control. Then we set that vision and work through it with the business strategy team. So the strategic plan is how we go from the current state to the target state. Every one of the managers needs to understand the current state and the vision state and it’s their role to work with the technical team to figure out how to move their piece of the pie to the target. We have 70 – 80 IT managers, so it’s very important that they are all buying-in to keep the many pieces of pie moving forward, and we take great pride in making sure everyone is involved in strategic planning.”