Home Business Information

CIO uses business strategy and outsourcing to bring legacy mortgage system up to Web speed.

Dan Roberts applies business savvy to his technical know-how in order to keep up with the Web, and the resulting accelerated pace of change.

"In the past we've been reactive," says Roberts, senior vice president and CIO, Corporate Information Services, PMI Group Inc., San Francisco. "When a customer makes a request, we react to that. When we see other firms doing something that would make sense for us to do as well, we react."

With the Web, the need to react instantaneously is much more prevalent than it was in the past. "Web-time permeates everything we do, not only Information Technology," says Roberts, adding that his personal goal is to apply the right Web technology to improve business.

The PMI Group is a leader in risk management technology and provides various products and services for the home mortgage finance industry, as well as title insurance. As one of the largest private mortgage insurers in the U.S., PMI is one of the first to use the Web to streamline the underwriting process and offer contract underwriting and mortgage insurance services over the Internet to their customers.

Listening to Customers

Roberts based his strategy for building PMI's e-business infrastructure on customer input and on data gathered from technology providers.

"We are trying hard to receive input from our customers on what [capabilities] they would like us to provide through our systems," says Roberts. "We're also in touch with major providers of technology in the mortgage industry to assess where there are logical points of contact that would make sense for us to participate in. And then we marry together what we believe the customer needs."

A couple of years ago, PMI built a client/server Windows NT application in-house using VisualBasic and C++. "We wanted to enable our customers Web access to our policy-servicing application running on the mainframe," says Roberts. "We were getting good results and processed about half-a-million loan applications through this system last year, but we wanted a better running solution."

# posted by Medical Information : 2:37 AM