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

What are the top 2 challenges facing IT organizations this year? What are the top 2 opportunities? 

“Resources - we are entering an age where the IT industry is exploding again and with that we have new technologies coming at a faster and faster pace. Getting people up to speed in new technologies and keeping the pipeline filled is all very important. There are lots of organizations in Cincinnati that promote moving high school age kids into IT careers. Getting the whole resource pipeline full again is one of the bigger challenges we have around here.

Governance – we are a public company and as such we have financial, quarterly and yearly reporting and SEC obligations. When we publish financial information it must be locked down, which impacts general IT controls; the whole governance auditing process, results in a lot of friction within IT organizations.  It’s incredibly expensive and requires a tremendous effort to make it happen, but unfortunately it’s not optional in the world we live in. It’s a very difficult hurdle that all public companies must jump.

Opportunities – I think the influence that technology is going to bring the United States and the world, will be amazing. It’s not just in insurance, it’s all over; it’s in manufacturing, it’s in retail and it’s largely due to what’s happening in the IT industry.  It just breeds opportunity! With that said, I think there is something beautiful about insurance - it is an industry that so relies on IT, everything we produce and ship is built from a computer, so the challenge is enormous.  It’s a very technically difficult industry to automate, however we’re fortunate that we have the support and funding from the organization to address the very high technical challenges. This is a great environment and opportunity for IT career people! When I talk to college recruits, many of them have no idea how much IT is in insurance. They think of Google, Sysco, IBM, but really much of the IT professional line is in the financial services industry, and we’re part of it, so that is exciting.”