Bulis oversees more than 65 people in operations and about 30 people in IT. The operations group is located in SBLI USA's operations center in Newark, N.J., while IT is divided between the company's New York headquarters and the Newark facility.

"Bringing operations and IT under the same leadership really allows SBLI to bring together people, process, and technology," Bulis contends. "It allows us to identify and create significant IT and business alignment between the two teams."

That alignment includes finding innovative ways to use IT to attract and retain customers. During the past several years, Bulis and his team have devoted much time and effort to building an infrastructure to drive customers to the company's Web site and online agent and customer portals. The carrier recently revamped its Web site to deliver quoting and purchasing products online in English or Spanish.

With Cisco technology as the foundation, Bulis and his team used VoIP to build a distributed enterprise network that carries both voice and data. The company was an early adopter of VoIP.

"Instead of being caught in the trap of having to build out a separate voice network, we went with VoIP right out of the gate," Bulis explains. "This allowed us to deliver all of our browser-based applications, our distributed call center, and our sales and service components over the same network while providing the right level of security on all those different levels."

Building a distributed sales and service model has allowed SBLI USA to minimize costs and maximize efficiency. According to Bulis, the company has seen significant improvement in its online visibility and steady growth in sales leads coming in from the Internet.

"We're constantly evolving our Web presence to support our sales and service initiatives," he adds. "In the last year, we've invested a significant amount of time and energy into optimizing our site for natural search marketing as well as pay-per-click marketing. We're also in the process of leveraging micro-sites to support the sale of individual products."

Other initiatives include upgrading SBLI USA's primary individual life administration system to enhance support of new products, transitioning to advanced rules-based systems to improve efficiency, and focusing on enterprise application integration.

Bulis believes IT is in a position to help the company weather any challenges created by the current credit crisis. "There is a lot of discussion about how the current activity in the credit marketplace may impact our customers," he says. "Technology is going to support the product delivery and operating efficiency that is a key part of our companywide attention to these challenges."

Sharon Baker is a freelance business writer based in Charlotte, N.C.