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Grange Insurance CIO Michael Fergang's tenure demonstrates that developing a creative team with the right business mind-set can result in delivery of solutions unforeseen by the business.
Michael Fergang insists that he owes much of his success to letting the talented people in his shop do what they do best, and to having been in the right place at the right time. The Grange Insurance CIO cut his technology teeth on Wall Street in the 1980s, at a time when, he says, rapid adoption of technology - combined with a dearth of experienced professionals - made it easy to accumulate experience in a wide variety of technology areas. "Because of the immaturity of technology, if you expressed interest in something, you were afforded the opportunity to get involved, and you were able to move fairly easily within a company or between companies," Fergang recalls. "The '80s were a great time to learn all different disciplines in IT."
According to Fergang, the breadth of experience he gained enabled him to take on the position of CIO at a financial holding company fairly early in his career. The experimental atmosphere of the time, he says, left him with an abiding interest in innovation that has colored the activities and accomplishments of his IT organization.
Accordingly, Fergang was influential in making Columbus, Ohio-based Grange (more than $1 billion in 2011 premium) the first insurance company to provide real-time endorsements via agency management systems, and one of the first to implement a real-time bridge between those systems and comparative raters, according to the carrier. Grange also was the first insurer in the country to use the F# programming language to develop and implement a rating system, which reduced the turnaround time for actuaries to perform "what/if" analysis and validate the impact on premiums from six hours to nine minutes, Fergang reports. He also oversaw the development and implementation of a fraud system that utilizes unstructured adjuster notes to...