The IT executives indicated that their chief information officers and chief executive officers often don't see eye-to-eye: half of the respondents in the survey said they were only moderately confident about aligning their companies' IT and business goals for growth.

The survey also showed that many insurers lack multi-year IT strategies. While the majority of respondents said their companies have a one-or-two year plan for prioritizing IT investments, half said they don't have plans beyond that timeframe.

Further, the poll revealed that ACORD still has a tough road ahead in developing and marketing insurance data standards. When asked whether non-IT executives at their company understand the role of ACORD standards, 55 percent of IT executives said "seldom" while less than 30 percent said "sometimes." And more than half said they don't have a corporate industry standards compliance strategy in place.

Charles McCaig, chief information officer at the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, commented during the panel discussion that problems revealed in the poll are all too common for insurance IT executives: challenges coming from being asked to do more with less.

"CEOs tend to view bottom-line results and take costs out, so there is an awful lot of pressure on corporate CIOs to run more efficient IT operations and take costs out," Mr. McCaig said. He noted that Chubb's IT spending would be flat until end of 2006, but with employees' salary raises and rising vendor licenses, that effectively translates into a shrinking budget, he said.

Regarding regulatory compliance, Mr. McCaig said Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance regulation and ongoing scrutiny of the insurance sector continue to have a huge impact on insurers' IT.

"We needed to refurbish systems to do a better job on transparency and produce data needed for compliance," Mr. McCaig said. "I feel that we were asked to take on an enormous effort and make many changes with a deadline imposed. We didn't get additional funding, so this caused us to push aside other strategic initiatives," he said, adding, "It was an enormous effort, and it's not over."

Mr. McCaig acknowledged that in the course of its regulatory-compliance effort, Chubb's IT has embraced some standards, simplified processes and consolidated some systems, which left Chubb in a better shape. "It will give us more transparency. It's just that it was a rough way to get there."

Prudential Financial's chief information officer Barbara Koster echoed Mr. McCaig's sentiments. "Insurers' IT budget is still flat-to-down from what I hear," Ms. Koster said. "Prudential's IT budget is flat, which means we have to take dollars from somewhere else to handle Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm Leach Bliley and HIPAA privacy rule. We have to find better, cheaper, faster ways to implement compliance activities, because we are not getting the money for it."