In and of themselves, there's no return on investment. There isn't an ROI until you get a business application that uses the infrastructure. Yet infrastructure is the piece of the technology pyramid managers can least afford to avoid. Walker has a healthy respect for wires and plugs. He and his information services group preside over a massive infrastructure that each day processes 350,000 phone calls and 16 million computer transactions for USAA, an insurance and diversified financial services association.
Technology plays a critical and measurable role in the company's survival.
But unlike traditional insurers, which maintain local agents in thousands of markets, USAA conducts its business entirely by telephone, fax and direct mail. The agent has a knock on the door. Our marriage of computers and telecommunications has to be able to compete with that neighborly knock. For all the excellence built into the current systems, managers saw as early as 1995 that they'd be encountering traffic troubles ahead. Simultaneously, the desktop modernization project will put 12,000 new high-end Pentium PCs on the desktop this year, with approximately 20,000 machines slated to be installed by the end of 1999.