A glimpse inside the personal technology arsenal and strategies that empower todays leading insurance IT professionals.

Talk to any of the people in my organization, Tony Candito says, and theyll tell you Im a geek at heart.Maybe he is at heart, but at work Candito is senior vice president and chief information officer of individual business, operations, and technology. Its a mouthful, he admits. Its also a big jobCIO of the largest operating unit of MetLife, the largest life insurer in the U.S., with over $2.4 trillion of insurance in force as of the end of 2002. Beyond heading up the companys IT, he is responsible for compliance and MetLifes customer response center.

Job aside, he also gets to exercise his love of technology at home. Ahead of the growing trend of homeowners to forsake traditional desktop computers for notebooks, Candito and his wife, a speech pathologist, have long had only portable computers. For many years, we had a wired household, he says, but a couple of years ago I wanted to experience firsthand what a wireless network was like, so I could envision how it would work in our sales offices. He replaced the wired network with a wireless one, connecting their individual notebooks to each other and to the remote printer they keep in a different part of the house.