ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR | INSURANCE TECHNOLOGY GROUP
Atul Poladia is a former Director of Information Technology at Nationwide Insurance. During a career spanning fourteen years (eleven of which have been spent in the property/casualty insurance industry), Atul had led major project initiatives, managed a $26 million annual software application portfolio budget and directed a staff of approximately 180 onshore and offshore technical resources. As Director of IT, Enterprise Internet Portfolio, Atul created a proof of concept team to rapidly develop and test new features in reaction to competitor activity and decreased average release time for new projects by 50%, which contributed to a 300% increase in policy bind rate over previous systems in less than nine months.
While at Nationwide, Atul was instrumental in building outsourcing strategy, realignment of software applications to reflect portfolio priorities and retraining of the staff effectively by transitioning technical staff from a WinDNA to a J2EE skill set. This effort saved Nationwide approximately $25 million in terms of retaining employees, retaining SME knowledge in-house, process cost and eliminating reductions in force, improving morale and increasing employee retention to 90%. His team was the recipient of Nationwide’s 2008 Outstanding IT Contribution Award, was a finalist in the same competition in 2007 and also won First Prize in Application Development Trends magazine’s 2001 Innovator Awards.
Atul has an extensive set of technology and supporting skills, having knowledge of project management and software development lifecycle methodologies (including PMBOK, Traditional Waterfall, RUP, and Agile), software development languages (VB.Net, C#, C++, C, ASP, JSP, Java, XML, HTML) and database tools (SQL Server, Oracle *SQL Forms, *SQLMenus and PL/SQL).
Atul holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Mumbai, India.