Burning Down The House

Its a classic exercise for the kids: The house is on fire. You can only save ten of your beloved possessions. What do you grab? Okay, now the rules have changed: You can only save nine items. Any six. Any four. As your options get narrower and narrower, what do you save?The economy may be a few steps away from its darkest lows, but were still in a recession, and information officers are finding themselves in a cruel real-life version of that once-silly kids game. Were cutting your budget by 10 percent. Who do you want to save? Were cutting by 20 percent. Were cutting by 25 percent. Who makes the cut, and why? And how do you fill the gaps created by those who are gone?We asked these questions of CIOs and other high-level tech decision makers. Of course, asking who youd save in the event of cutbacks is awfully close to asking who you wouldnt save. Thats a topic that makes everybody nervous, so we promised not to use any real namescompany or personalin this article.

When it comes to naming the most crucial position in an insurance IT department, many CIOs, particularly from small and mid-sized carriers, came down foursquare behind their database administrators. One, head of a fairly large P&C operation in Pennsylvania, put it bluntly: Regardless of what language youre programming in or what packaged application youre using to run your company, at the end of the day its all about the data. If you dont have anybody to help you manage the databases, you wont be able to make the correct decisions to run your company.Finding someone outside the company wasnt an option, even if it cost less. Nobody felt you could simply replace a good DBA with a random consultant from the outside and expect that consultant to do just as good a job. Reports are a never-ending need, said the CIO of one small specialty lines carrier in New York City. The network issues could be outsourced, but the database administrator is woven into what we do every day.Also high on the list of critical employees are software developers, even with the market still somewhat saturated with dot-com refugees. Coders with that same hip-deep level of integration usually find themselves protected as wellits hard to outsource support for a program you created in-house; you might end up having to bring back the people you let go, this time as high-paid consultants.You gotta have someone who understands whats going on [with the companys software], said the CIO of a mid-sized Dallas-based P&C company. I can outsource other technical activities, he explained, but proprietary software dictates a dedicated staff.A CIO of a small company agrees: We have a lot of proprietary applications, and they need to be supported. Thats not a job you can run a classified to fill.Programmers security may also be dependent on the companys focus. Someone proficient with imaging applications is relatively safe if the company is beginning a document management program. And someone with a broad knowledge of mainframes and integration will do well in a merger-happy environment, as the vice-president of technology at a small (for now, apparently) Phoenix-based life insurance company pointed out. Acquisitions are our number one area of growth, he said. Programmers are absolutely vital to the merging of the various computer systems.If push came to shove, many CIOs would look to outsource such matters as networking and infrastructure, but others saw that as far too basic a need to farm out. You need to continue to run your business, said a CIO of an all-lines P&C carrier; he would keep the network team protected.Another CIOthis one from a mid-size life insurerlists the network team just after his senior software developer, saying, Without them, theres no way to deploy all that new programming the software guy is doing.