In the days following the storm, the company moved its operations to a subsidiary branch office in Baton Rouge. Escorted by a state trooper, employees made daily trips to Metairie to pick up a server from the backup data center as well as boxes of paper files.

Those trips convinced Schneider that Gray Insurance needed an electronic document management system to eliminate all that paper. Once the company moved back into its own office space, he began investigating options. In December 2006, Schneider and his team implemented ImageRight 3.4. The system, which scans between 10,000 and 50,000 images a day, has helped Gray Insurance standardize its filing system, deliver real-time information, streamline training, and improve workflow.

The hurricane persuaded Schneider to abandon plans to locate two disaster recovery centers within such close proximity. The company built a state-of-the-art center 50 miles north of New Orleans. "Our two data centers now are 50 miles apart instead of across the street from each other," Schneider says.

The aftermath of the hurricane also led Schneider to begin a business process management initiative aimed at capturing institutional knowledge culled from the minds of key employees. Business analysts are interviewing members of each department to document process flows and develop operational manuals.

"For years, critical processes and decisions were made by key individuals, and when they leave or retire, that knowledge often goes with them," Schneider says. "We're trying to prevent such an exodus of expertise."

In 2006, Gray Insurance migrated all its open systems to blade servers running VMware and attached to a storage area network. The company also migrated its physical servers to virtual ones, replaced disparate mirroring technologies with one system, and upgraded its AS/400s to IBM's i5s midrange platform capable of running Java.

Schneider, who has worked in IT for 20 years, calls himself "one of those rare birds who always has worked in the field in which I received my degree." He joined Gray Insurance in 2002 as an information systems manager and was promoted to CIO in 2006.

With Hurricane Katrina and the IT changes it necessitated behind the company, Schneider and his team are focusing on other projects, including implementing a claims management system on the company's new platform. Schneider expects the system will help Gray Insurance increase claims volume, lower costs, standardize processing, and provide more accurate regulatory and statistical reporting.

Schneider plans to implement an enterprise service bus to improve information sharing with business partners. "In the near future, companies will have to be able to exchange information with service providers and partners on demand," he notes.

Long-term initiatives include enhancing the company's customer Web portal, unifying voice and data systems to improve customer service, and migrating software to the Java platform.

"We're a rapidly growing company, and we're dealing with all the issues that entails, but these are good problems to have," Schneider concludes.