Jim Ditmore, 2014 Honoree
- Title
- Senior vice president, Allstate Technology & Operations, Infrastructure Services
- Employer
- Allstate Insurance
- Location
- Northbrook, Ill.
- How are you turning your IT department into a services organization?
- We are centralizing infrastructure solution engineering and service management functions. In essence, we are bringing holistic, direct support for sets of applications together to provide better engineering for the entire 'business service.' It positions us to drive high performance, implement best practices, seize economies of scale and deliver consistent, predictable outcomes.
- A career highlight:
- As CIO at Ameritrade, we turned around a platform's availability and performance issues and developed industry firsts: online statements and confirms. At an employee meeting, the CEO, a respected pioneer in the industry, introduced me as "the guy who saved the company." He explained that, without my leadership, he would have had to sell years earlier.
- Quick ROI project:
- Allstate has fully transitioned to a VoIP network. We implemented this network internally and thus have significantly decreased external conferencing costs. We achieved ROI within six months of the platform going into production.