Our Technology By: William Moses Director of Information Technology Developed for PIANY/NYIA CEO/Agency Conference 2004

Merger January 1, 2003 Bauer InsuranceCapital Region

Original Technology Redshaw 10 PCs Windows 98/Xp Network Applied 16 PCs Windows 98/2000/XP Network Bauer InsuranceCapital Region

3 Steps to Organize our Automation 1.Encourage a culture of collaboration with all departments –Obtain regular feedback from CSR, Producers, Principal and anyone involved in using and working a system. Always open to good ideas. Empowering the users to effect change. 2.Collect feedback to evaluate the business processes and workflow. 3.Adopted a dynamic broad reaching vision and goals to get there. Take technology and align it with organizational vision. –Step a plan –Establish implementation model –Manage system –Measure results

Goals Summed Up –Make it easy and convenient to do business with Capital Bauer Insurance. –Consistently improve on customer service, response and delivery times, and reduce costs Our Paradigm –To bring great service to the customer by developing our systems and process from Our Customers Back, not top down

Our Plan Adopted standards and use common tools –We ordered our computer equipment only from vendors who had high quality products (IS9000) and had a service warranty track record. –We made sure to use applications that make it easy to communicate with our customers, carriers vendors. (i.e. Microsoft Office) –We setup our , fax, website to communicate a consistent message to our clients. (i.e. signature)

Plan (continued) We implemented a work anytime and anywhere framework. An infrastructure of PCs and servers governed by the right policies that could move as we moved and change as we changed. The framework Includes ability scanned docs to digital files, voic and faxes available on the desktop and remotely accessible anytime and anywhere both wired and wirelessly. We measure the impact of the technology by having all of our systems report. Our Spam firewall tells us who is spamming us, our firewall tells us who is trying to hack us, our server tells us who us the most, our phone systems gives us information of calls. We collate this information in a dashboard where users of the system could measure impact and Consistently improve on customer service, response and delivery times, and reduce costs.

Current Technology Position Over 35 Busy Users Production (windows 2000 sp4) and Test Network (Windows 2003) Citrix Server – Remote Access Microsoft Exchange Server – groupware ( , calendaring, public folders) Sonic Wall Wireless (Secure Hotspot) Barracuda Networks SPAM Firewall Blackberry Device and MS PocketPC devices (remote access) Repartee/ Advantage Voic /Fax Server Standardized Dell Server and PCs

Future Voice Over IP Customer Lookup by Caller-ID Phone Access, Website access to Customer Policy 24/7 Utility Computing ASP Linux