"Never compromise integrity" has become a long-standing principle of the $44 billion Chubb Group of Insurance Companies. Chubb offers both commercial lines and personal lines of insurance through its 120 offices in 29 countries.

Everything about Chubb propelled June E. Drewry, a 30-year IT veteran, to come out of retirement in 2005 and become global chief information officer of Chubb & Son, the organization that oversees the management of the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies. She has held IT leadership positions, including CIO, at Aetna Inc., Freddie Mac Corporation, and the Aon Group. She also has received numerous IT leadership awards from organizations, such as Women in Technology and SIM.

While Drewry's predecessor did a great job running the IT organization, she, nevertheless, faced several challenges: improve the IT governance model, drive innovation, and make sure her successor could fill her shoes. Enterpriseleadership.org recently spoke with Drewry to discuss how she's carrying out these tasks, along with her involvement in IT organizations and what she learned from September 11, 2001. Here's what she had to say:

EL: What's the leadership structure of your IT  organization?

JD: Our organizational model mimics Chubb's decentralized federated model, which consists of three business units. We have 1,500 IT employees who are managed by three geographical (or zone) CIOs, three business unit CIOs, one CIO for finance, and another CIO for claims. Each CIO, naturally, has a group of direct reports. A shared service manages our IT infrastructure for the U.S. Collectively, these CIOs comprise my senior IT leadership team.

EL: Can you describe how IT handles business process  improvements?

JD: We don't have a formal program for it. Our applications folks are embedded in our business units, and our IT federated model mimics the company's federated model. We do have centralized core resources that look at the leverage of things across business units, such as using a significant process or eliminating processes or workflow. If we have a particular benefit in one area, we then use the core staff to make sure we're exploiting it across the business units.

EL: After you joined Chubb, the company went to a more formal  governance model for IT. Why did you need to do this?

JD: I got used to joining companies where the relationship between IT and the business units needed improvement. Chubb presented a different scenario: IT had good alignment with the business units. Our work quality was high; projects got done on time and on budget.

My first task as CIO included getting all my CIO leaders together and finding out what our next challenges were. We agreed to work on enterprise-wide efforts. Some of our work had become captive in the business units. If we were going to get a real payback from IT, we needed to develop our enterprise architecture. It had to enhance our ability to leverage without having to re-platform. We also wanted to bring the business unit leaders together to do their strategic planning and to leverage technology. Specifically, we didn't want to find out individually what each business unit was trying to accomplish and then go off and do it in the background. This new process enabled us to bring IT governance and business governance together in the same room.

EL: How does your governance model work?

JD: We meet more often than IT organizations in other companies. In fact, my peers in other companies say it's unusual to meet as often as we do. Because it was so hard to plan, in 2006, the senior IT leadership team started to meet once every week for several hours. We meet every two weeks for a couple of hours more. Then, we meet off site once a month for two-and-a-half days. During this time, we go through the formality of governance where we review technologies and begin to push them further along. We're not allowed to discuss the day-to-day status of upgrades. That's a waste of our energy when we're off site.

EL: How do you keep track of projects for all of these  meetings?

JD: We have a dashboard. It's not a balanced scorecard. Some of our business units have their own balanced scorecard where they look at people, process, and technology. We look at a set of projects we've initiated as a group. We have a subcommittee that works on this weekly to keep things moving between those two-and-a-half days.

EL: Anything else you can say about your governance  model?

JD: Based on all of our industry reading and research, we learned that the IT governance process was the first step for getting things done right. So, if this was the case, we decided to run our service-level-agreement efforts through the governance process, along with our enterprise architecture and our creation of centers of excellence.

EL: Do you use any formal quality best practices, such as Six Sigma,  in IT at Chubb?

JD: Within IT we're not working on Six Sigma. Instead, we've identified those best practices used by each business unit or by the IT groups that support those business units. Before we can standardize on these best practices, we need to assign someone to make all of the business units aware of them. To this end, we can create a center of excellence to accomplish this task.

For external best practices, we belong to several networking groups where we have a different person represented at each one. This approach has created a broader network for us and more development opportunities for each group representative.

EL: Can you go into more detail about your center-of-excellence  concept?

JD: We've mandated functions such as risk management or payroll. Our shared services organization runs specific functions on behalf of the business units. They can't go outside the organization for these services. That's how we derived economies of scale in the U.S.

Then we have centers of excellence where we create areas that reside in a business unit or in corporate. For example, a center of excellence might support a pilot project in a business unit. We know there is a payback, but in the meantime, the group needs to educate others. We also have mature centers of excellence that set policy for the way we do things.

If what a center does becomes embedded in the way we do business, then we eliminate the center. Right now, we're looking at how we account for where all of the funding for centers of excellence should reside, even if the center is being managed by the business unit. Our goal is to make sure we capture good metrics on what business units are spending on these centers.

EL: Is the center of excellence concept the way you drive  innovation?

JD: Yes. We make sure that we don't innovate on the same issues in each business unit. We try to innovate once and replicate after that. Some people fail to see that. If we see a real payback from something a business unit has done, we need to have an evangelist get the message out to the other business units. Another part of the evangelist's job is to find the business cases and to get in front of the strategic business units. It's up to them to make good business decisions, now, or a year from now.

EL: How are you going about grooming your successor?

JD: That's easier said then done. Long-time service has become a hallmark for Chubb. My predecessor was CIO for 16 years. This company understands that people are its greatest asset, and treats them accordingly. Most companies pay lip service to this.

I came out of retirement to work at Chubb with the condition that I'd be here three to five years. During this time, I'd be grooming my successor. My predecessor had a pool of excellent candidates who were considered for this job, and I've added other candidates to this pool. This is the first time in my career where my primary responsibilities have been to find my successor and to carry out all of the day-to-day CIO responsibilities.

EL: So what have you learned from finding your  successor?

JD: Looking for a successor has been an eye-opening experience. I've totally change the way I work; I wish I had done this 10 years ago. Most IT executives spend more time doing and less time grooming. Now, I delegate probably five times more than I ever did in my life. My job is to give my prospective successors enterprise leadership experience, which differs from what either a strategic business unit CIO has or a zone CIO gets.

EL: Do you think the CIO role should be rotational?

JD: It becomes a way to resolve issues with the business alignment of IT, or with business units that want to be involved with technology. Chubb is the first company I've worked at where business units had great alignment with IT. Business people here truly understand the value of technology and deriving more value out of it. So, why would we want to rotate a finance person who understands the value of technology and who accepts us as a perfect partner?

On the other hand, IT isn't going to set up financial policies, but we understand them, along with understanding underwriting and our markets. If you get the depth of knowledge right in the IT organization, then I don't know how much rotation buys you.

EL: You've participated in a number of IT venues, such as the CIO Executive Summit, and have been on the board of SIM. Why have these organizations been important to your IT career?

JD: The network has been invaluable to me. That's something I've been trying to teach our younger IT staff. All of the book knowledge in the world can't help you to deal with the reality of executing and getting things done.

The more I've move from one company to another, I've realized that the same issues exist everywhere; only the names and faces change. Organizations, such as SIM, provide a safe place for getting valuable input from IT professionals. You can use their input to resolve problems or to step back and make a decision. A lot of growth comes from this communication process.

The insurance industry, like many other industries, has its own group of organizations, such as ACORD. Because many industries are so competitive, one can no longer feel comfortable talking to peers at an industry venue. SIM, for example, provides you with a cross-industry network where you can talk about, say, your service-level agreements.

As for speaking venues, such as the CIO Executive Summit, they have been great places to make connections and to source IT candidates.

EL: As CIO of Aon, you had to deal with the tragic events of  September 11. What did you learn from this experience?

JD: I learned that it's all about people, not IT, when something like that happens. Yes, it's great to be able to transfer the work to another data center, which we did. That day, Aon lost 175 people. The entire company focused on trying to find them. The people who survived were in shock. Most people weren't psychologically prepared to go back to work. The last thing we wanted to do was to pester them about picking up a laptop so they could work from home.

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Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a writer from Boston,  Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.