IT Leadership Award Honoree John Kellington

Editor's Note: The IT Leadership Awards, presented by Pride Technologies, celebrate local IT professionals who help local, regional, national and global businesses run better through engaged leadership and a commitment to innovation. For the next 10 weeks, check back each Tuesday and Thursday as we highlight one of the 20 honorees of this year's award.

Cincinnati Financial, through The Cincinnati Insurance Companies, specializes in creating insurance policies for everyone from individual consumers to large commercial accounts. But when it comes to ensuring the technology behind such a huge enterprise is ahead of the game, John Kellington is the man with a plan.

“At The Cincinnati Insurance Companies, we market our products solely through select independent agents,” Kellington says. “These agents represent a number of companies, and for each one, they may have to follow a different workflow to service their policyholders. Our company continually invests in new technologies to streamline their workflow, helping our agents work efficiently.”

Through the systems Kellington’s team creates, the company and the independent agents who represent it can build policies for an individual customer, such as an auto or home policy, or for a large commercial account for a hospital or university.

“Over the past few years,” Kellington explains, “we have implemented policy systems that use predictive analytics and modeling to increase the precision of our selection and pricing process. Predictive analysis is the process of mining the data for patterns, then leveraging those patterns to create advanced pricing mechanisms.”

He adds, “For all insurance companies, leveraging data in new and different ways is critical for success. We are very proud of our abilities and accomplishments in this area.”

His team isn’t the only one taking notice – the efforts of the IT team, combined with the rest of the Cincinnati Insurance leaders’ efforts, has resulted in national accolades, including inclusion on the Forbes 2014 America’s Most Trustworthy Financial Companies list.

The company’s great track record is one reason Kellington came to work with Cincinnati Insurance. He worked for a variety of companies (including IBM and Ohio Casualty) before moving to ACORD, the company that sets international standards for insurance before coming to Cincinnati Insurance.

“I came to Cincinnati because it has a great reputation,” says Kellington. “Insurance representatives say that in the field we have good companies, great companies and Cincinnati Insurance.”

He notes that the great support of agents is part of the reason for the great reputation. “Cincinnati was started 60 years ago by independent agents,” says Kellington. “What we do is go into a city and hand-pick the best agents, then we support the heck out of them with great products and service. Cincinnati Insurance becomes critical for that agent.”

Kellington and his team work hard to not only support the agents, but to handle complex systems and keep moving the business as a whole forward.

“With the steady improvement of our core systems and the use of predictive models,” says Kellington, “we have grown much faster than the industry and with very profitable results. We have the ability to analyze our business with a much finer grain of detail than ever before.”

Previous honorees featured: Jay Brown, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for UC Health; Vinit Kohli, Vice President of Management Information Systems for Sibcy Cline; Anup Nair, Chief Information Officer of Vantiv; Nelson C. Vincent, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer for UC Information Technologies