The message from "the chairman," as most of the IT execs callBenmosche, was that the IT staffs supporting MetLife's business unitsneeded to rein in the subsidiaries so that the huge insurer couldstart reaping economies of scale. "When MetLife started testing itsvalue proposition with the Street, the big sentiment was that it'stime to harvest some of that scale you've got," says Tony Candito,senior vice president and CIO of MetLife's individual business unit."At that point, everything changed."

Cavanagh began by "integrating" his five business unit CIOs and hisCTO into an IT governance board. They meet monthly to discuss IT andintegration strategy and specific projects, both enterprisewide andwithin each business unit, and they've had more than enough to filltheir agenda.

Follow the Financials

The first integration task for MetLife was getting its financial housein order. That fell to Peggy Fechtmann, senior vice president, CIO ofcorporate systems and chief e-business officer. Even after the IPO inApril 2000, its financial processes and systems remained siloed.Different subsidiaries sent financial information to MetLife'scomptroller in Tampa, Fla., in different ways - by FedEx, mail ore-mail - making it largely a manual job to close the books each quarter."It's comical in hindsight, but it certainly wasn't comical then,"Fechtmann says.

Her first step toward standardizing and integrating financial systemswas to form a steering committee of IT executives and subsidiarybusiness partners to discuss the financial processes of MetLife andits subsidiaries. They knew they needed general ledger, accountspayable and asset management capabilities, and they planned to go withpackaged software. "We have a lot less people doing hard-core coding,and a lot more people doing package implementation," says Fechtmann."We're more systems integrators than anything." They looked at OracleOracle,PeopleSoft and SAPSAP before choosing PeopleSoft. "There was anexhaustive analysis, but there was a slight bias toward PeopleSoftbecause Met had implemented PeopleSoft for HR in 1995," explainsFechtmann. MetLife committed $80 million over two years forPeopleSoft's Enterprise Profitability Management (EPM)package. Alles zu Oracle auf CIO.de Alles zu SAP auf CIO.de