Meet the 2009 Women in Insurance Leadership

Insurance Networking News, October 1, 2009

INN Editorial Staff

While female professional leaders perform as well or better than men in many areas, they are not perceived to be as strong as men when it comes to articulating a vision of the future and translating that vision into a strategic direction for the organization. This is what research from INSEAD, an international graduate business school and research institution based in Fontainebleau, France and Singapore, concludes. INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra, who headed the leadership assessment research, says that this (or this perception) may be what is keeping some women from the executive level in some companies. If this truly is the case, the women profiled by INN's editors on the next eight pages must be exceptions to the research. These six women in insurance leadership and four notable achievers are blazing the trails for other female executives. We can tip our hats to many insurance companies' efforts in promoting growth for women. But, Insurance Networking News wants to recognize individual unique accomplishments of the industry's prominent female leaders.

The winners were chosen by four of the 2008 award program winners:

* Judy Anderson (now retired), Rural Community Insurance Services, Anoka, Minn.

* Julie Davis, Aon Risk Services of the West Inc., San Jose, Calif.

* Madelyn Lankton, Travelers Insurance, Hartford, Conn.

* Sharon Ritchey, The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., Hartford, Conn.

Judging for the program included a rating methodology based on the candidate's contribution to the institution's top and bottom lines, job complexity, corporate governance and ethics, and leadership and management skills. Read on to find out more. -Carrie Burns

JULIA BOLAND

SVP, senior area IT manager

The Chubb Corp.

Warren, N.J.

Few people likely appreciate the nexus between insurance and technology more acutely than Julia Boland. "I actually started on the business side, so I had an opportunity to build relationships with business partners," she says. "I realized that understanding the business and having those relationships was going to enable me as an IT professional to do more for the organization."

This broad perspective began paying dividends as far back as 1983, when, after spending six months observing operations at a field location, Boland was instrumental in making the business case to bring PCs to the desks of Chubb. "It gave me a much broader insight into how tightly the technology needed to be tied to the business, and how important it was for IT professionals to continue to understand the business."

Julia Boland

Indeed, this insight is critical in her present posting as senior area IT manager and SVP at Chubb. "My current role is less of an IT technical role, and more of a services and solutions role for both IT and the business."

Boland still makes time to get to field offices to watch the staff use the technology her team creates back at corporate. "Each new technology adds complexity to our environment," she says. "You have to manage the concept of enterprise solutions even more today than we used to because there are so many different choices."

With Chubb employing a federated IT model, the enterprise services and solutions (ESS) department she oversees is tasked with providing intra- and cross-business unit solutions. "The challenge with our federated IT model is having all the individual areas continue to think about enterprise considerations or impacts."

In addition to her challenges leading ESS, Boland also heads up two other large initiatives within the company: IT risk management and business continuity/disaster recovery.

The former requires Boland, and the chief information security officer reporting to her, to address myriad compliance issues (SOX, HIPAA) and data security issues from both a business and technology vantage point. "I would argue that from a risk management perspective, you do need to know the insurance business just to know where the risks are," she says.

Boland acknowledges that leading the business continuity effort is a consuming task. "We are in the middle of revamping our disaster recovery solution, and I am managing the oversight of that initiative," she says. "That's a huge challenge for our organization, and a major challenge for me."

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