Anne Tarryk, Middlesex Mutual

Anne Tarryk is the top tech at Middlesex Mutual Assurance Company, a 165-year old carrier in Middletown, Conn-a small town about a half-hour south of Hartford, in a beautiful home office (the tallest building in town) with an antique, horse-drawn, hand-operated fire pumper in the lobby. I expected to find a typical New England mutual, and a senior IT executive with a standard title like CIO or vice president of information technology. Wrong on both counts.

Tarryk's title is "vice president of distributed technologies." Not the typical description for the senior IT executive, but it turns out that Middlesex isn't your typical New England mutual, either.

Middlesex is an $80 million carrier, writing predominantly personal lines in four states (Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) and just entering New York. It does it all out of its home office and two small branches. It currently has about three hundred agents, a number that's growing as it expands into New York. It's also moving into niche markets, with products like its innovative antique homeowners policy, called the Restorationist.