Information Technology 2008 Major Accomplishments. Application Development

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1 Application Development epas Application Transition to Citizens A three year contract with BIPT for epas development & support concluded in March of During this timeframe, Citizens IT moved all staffing resources, infrastructure, development and support of the epas application in-house for personal lines policy management. The result has been significant and noticeable performance improvements, application enhancements, higher quality and service levels, improved integration capability and enhanced Disaster Recovery capability. Under this agreement Citizens has a 99 year lease to utilize and customize the software at no additional cost. Approximately $5.4M in savings were realized in 2008 over 9 months. Single Personal Lines (SPL) This multi-year project completed on schedule with the implementation of functionality that enables personal residential wind-only policies (PR-W) to be administered in epas. Streamlined processes, new PR-W coverage offerings, and a consolidated portal for personal residential policies are some of the many benefits introduced for policy holders, agents and internal staff from all departments. Over the course of 2009, PR-W policies are being rewritten into epas at renewal. IT Strategic Assessment and Claims Management Systems (CMS) Requirements Study Citizens conducted two formal Strategic Studies during 2008 utilizing independent consultants. The IT Strategic Assessment was focused on Policy Systems Strategy and IT Benchmarking. The detailed Claims Management Systems (CMS) Requirements Study gathered requirements and investigated the options for obtaining a feature rich, state-of-theart CMS. As a result of the two studies, Citizens has decided to pursue the feasibility of identifying a core insurance best of suite product. A best of suite product would include system functionality for policy administration, claims and billing. Electronic Document Submission Implementation of this project in 2008 enables agents to submit personal lines policy applications and other documents to Citizens electronically. This makes the information available immediately to Citizens business units eliminating the need for scanning and indexing. Agent Certification System During 2008 the Agent Certification System was implemented whereby agents can become certified with Citizens for personal residential, commercial residential, and commercial nonresidential lines of business. In the same effort, this system was integrated with the Agent Renewal System to validate an agent s certification before issuing the agent s renewal.

2 Technical Resource Center Web Knowledge This project provided the TRC with an online knowledge base and reference tools to allow electronic research of policies, guidelines, and other information. This replaced a less efficient, paper based system. In the future, this product will be introduced to additional Citizens Departments and agents. Commercial Non-Residential Multi-peril New Product Line The system functionality was implemented in November to support the new Commercial Non-Residential Multi-peril (CNR-M) product line. This product replaces the CNR-W product (and system) that was limited to wind eligible regions with an offering of a CNR-M product that is available across the entire state of Florida. Actuarial Services Rating Analysis Tool (Emblem). A number of software products and associated data requirements were implemented during 2008 to support the Actuarial Department. In particular, the Emblem product enables the analysis of Citizens historical policy data and will lead to a new rating plan that will be ready for the 2010 Rate Filing. This new rating plan will be more accurate and relevant for all lines of business. Automated Underwriting The Automated Underwriting project implemented system functionality that imposes scoring criteria for each of our policy forms to identify those new business applications that can either be automatically approved or cancelled based upon the presence or lack of key underwriting criteria. At the end of 2008 the functionality was being piloted by a number of agencies. Policyholder Self Service (ManageMyPolicy) New web portal and phone capability were implemented to allow policyholders to obtain policy and payment information via Citizens web site or through voice response (phone) Data Warehouse Improvements During 2008, numerous improvements were made to the Citizens Data Warehouse such as: a) expanding the content of the Data Warehouse to include Commercial Policy and Agency Tracking data; b) Completion of numerous Claims Statistical Reporting capabilities such as Monthly Metrics, Catastrophe Reporting, Special Investigation Unit (SIU) and Litigated and Disputed Claims Unit (LDCU) reporting; c) Completed the development, testing and implementation of the Wind Cube enhancements for Actuarial Services; d) Deployed Query Studio, an end user reporting tool, to Claims and Underwriting power users; e) Completed Product Line and Risk Unit level enhancements to the PIF Month-End Management reports to support the SPL Wind-only project

3 Technology and Infrastructure Technology Implementation Support of Major Application Initiatives In 2008, the Citizens IT team performed a major migration of the epas application from the IBM Raleigh outsourcing center to the Citizens Jacksonville data center facility and Tampa Disaster Recovery center. In addition major application system initiatives, including the Citizens Policy System Self Service, the Electronic Document Submission System and significant modifications to the Claims Tracking system were introduced into the Citizens Technology Infrastructure. Additional production system load testing systems were also implemented in Planning for the required core infrastructure upgrades necessary to support these new application services took place in 2007 and 2008 and implementation was completed in Enterprise Technology Consolidation Initiative This in progress initiative consists of numerous projects, including the Enterprise Active Directory Consolidation Project, Enterprise Server Virtualization Project, Tallahassee Data Center Consolidation project and numerous other data network, data storage and facilities projects. Major project milestone completions in 2008 have positioned Citizens in 2009 to start reaping benefits of consolidated IT operations. This has enhanced Citizens ability to respond quickly with technology solutions to support business initiatives while reducing the capital and on-going technology costs. Completion of the Jacksonville and Tampa Data Center Optimizations Completed in 2008 was the addition of required data center space within the two primary Citizens data center facilities. These upgrades included additional flooring, power and UPS additions, air-conditioning, and fire suppression systems. In conjunction with other enterprise level consolidation initiatives, these upgrades put in place the necessary facilities infrastructure to support the 2009 and 2010 planned technology and application initiatives. Enterprise Storage Systems and Backup/Recovery Systems Implementation and Optimization This project, initiated in 2007 and completed in 2008 deployed replacement technology for the primary and secondary data storage environments. An enterprise review of the long term data storage requirements for the organization factoring in benchmark data from other organizations for data growth projections and review of the reliability and availability needs of the organization for the data. An EMC enterprise solution was identified and deployed in The new environment is a tiered storage architecture providing multiple levels of storage capacity and performance, as well as archival systems, network attached storage (NAS) systems and Backup to Disk systems. Full enterprise backup solutions were replaced across the infrastructure in 2008 and now provide us with 100% success rates on enterprise backups on an on-going basis. Additionally, the infrastructure was put in place for replication of the enterprise storage environments from our Jacksonville facility to our

4 Tampa disaster recovery facility, providing for immediate protection and availability of our primary production data as it is processed throughout the day. Citizens Active Directory Consolidation Project Phase 1 of this project was planned and completed in Phase 2 is scheduled to complete by June It is part of the Enterprise Technology Consolidation project and focused on the re-engineering of the identify management and security components of the primary network identity repository. Citizens currently has a security model that remains from the formation activity of the Citizens corporation in 2003 and is based upon geographic location. The new model provides for a consolidated, role based model based on corporate and departmental units at the highest tiers and is in alignment with usage of applications in a role based environment. This change will reduce the complexity of the management of the primary technical security system for Citizens and reduce the complexity of the implementing new security and technical changes throughout the organization. Enterprise Virtualization At the conclusion of 2008, Citizens had virtualized approx 30% of our server infrastructure. This project, part of the core Enterprise Technology Consolidation Initiative has taken several years to reach this level of maturity due to significant planning, R&D activity and pilot implementations. Implemented in conjunction with our Storage Optimization project, this activity provides for significant higher levels of reliability and availability, integrating all requirements for application platforms Hardware, Software, Network, Storage, Backup and Recovery and Disaster Recovery. It is expected in 2009 that Citizens will see a 65-70% adoption rate of virtualization of the core server platforms, providing significant savings in technology facilities and server platform costs. Siemens Telephony System Upgrade Major changes in this area in 2008 included a Siemens HiPath Procenter Enterprise Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) Upgrade as well as a full Siemens PBX version upgrade. These system upgrades focused on both end-user improvements in call management activities in support of Citizens 400 call center agents and back-end, infrastructure improvements in management solutions for the entire PBX environment. In addition, these system upgrades have provide foundations for additional business initiatives surrounding our call center functions, including a new Underwriting call center activity that provides for improved service to Citizens Insurance Agents throughout Florida. Service Desk System Replacement The Numera Footprints service desk solution, supporting all of the IT Technology and Application Support units went live in 3rd quarter 2008 and replaced a smaller, less capable system from the same vendor. This new system enables the IT Service Desk to provide more efficient support to the customers of IT because of strong systems workflow alignment to the IT Technology support standards and our ITIL best practice implementations. Implementation of key performance measures with defined SLA s down to the individual

5 technicians have been implemented and are now being used on a daily basis to ensure appropriate levels of support are being maintained throughout the organization. Establishment of the 24x7 Technical Operations Center (TOC) With the movement of the epas platforms to the Citizens data centers and the establishment of 24x7 technical operations for numerous additional application systems in 2008, Citizens undertook the implementation of a 24x7 monitored technical operations center. Center staff are responsible for the monitoring of the health and availability of Citizens critical systems and provide 1st tier support when systems are impacted by an outage or other issue. This team also has responsibility for monitoring all approved changes during their implementation periods and supporting the requirements of the responsible parties. The goals here are higher levels of availability due to an eyes on monitor approach, and faster return to service when problems do occur to a system. While performance measures are still in progress for specific service level objectives. IT Governance, including Policies and Security. Citizens continues the process of implementing appropriate Control objectives for Information and Related Technology (CoBIT) practices across the IT organization. During 2008, numerous IT related policies and associated departmental procedures were developed to support required IT systems and application controls. Focus on both appropriate governance areas to insure compliance with established policies and standards, as well as implementation of new security technologies that ensure physical security of Citizens data and systems continues in Technology implementations of new internet firewalls, new versions of Symantec Antivirus and Malware software, and Websense (Web URL Filtering) were completed in Citizens was heavily examined in 2008 by four different audit activities and received no critical findings in this area.