COMMENTARY: HOW TO DRIVE A DIGITAL AGENDA
Thenewnimble IT projects that have been overlooked for years have shot to the top of board agendas, as companies, galvanised by the pandemic, commit to new ways of working. So, just how do you get buy-in for transformational change and how do you deliver it now? We asked Richard Farrell, Chief Innovation Officer for Netcall, David Germain, Group Chief Information Officer at RSA, and Nigel Walsh, who leads on the insurance industry and insurtech at Deloitte, to discuss their experience
It’s been a monumental struggle to win hearts, minds and budgets for transformational change in insurance. So, when the pandemic hit, there was a hold-your-breath moment as boards who’d previously committed to shifting the dial, weighed up their priorities in the face of business-critical pressures. But, according to Richard Farrell, chief innovation officer at Netcall, which offers low-code
contact centre and omnichannel messaging solutions over its Liberty platform, no one’s considering taking their foot off the gas. “Some of our larger insurance customers, that already had long-term digital plans, told us quite early on in the pandemic that they were prioritising our projects, because they were so important to their business outcomes,” he says. In fact, if anything, projects that had been idling at the bottom of companies’ to-do lists, suddenly found themselves greenlighted. “Every year, they’d be the part of the budget that got cut, but now they’re in the top tier of our programme prioritisation going forward,” says David Germain from insurer RSA. He’s one chief information officer who’s been building an IT strategy fit for just such a Damascene event. “RSA has been around since the 17th Century, so our brands are very well known. But we have technology that’s been around a hell of a long time, too (maybe not quite that long!). Trying to modernise that technology, build new products, create a bimodal architecture that can work with the old and the new, is really challenging,” he says. “We need a strategy that ensures we’re continuously moving at pace, making the right smart investments, aligning ourselves with the right smarttech/insurtech partners – which we’ve done more of in the last year than at any point in our history. And then building
those partnerships, because we can’t do it alone – we’re not an in-house development organisation. We want to be a Cloud-first adopter; where it makes sense, we want to build a low-code environment that’s API driven; and we want our stack to be microservicesdriven. So, we’re trying to put ourselves in a position where the partnerships we have, the architectures we drive, the ecosystem we’re a part of, all work together well.” This approach has been proven by the world coming to a standstill in 2020. “Our thinking, right now, is that we’ll exploit any platform opportunity that allows us to accelerate an outcome for the organisation, and not become the victim of the business process because our organisation thinks it can only be done a certain way,” says Germain. “A lot of platforms come with out-of-the-box functions that you can tweak, and that has to be the focus. Take the Guidewire claims programme we’re using. If you’re smart around how you deliver that tech, move it on, so you don’t have an issue with creating infrastructure around it, and use the Guidewire Cloud, or software as a service (SaaS) solution, you’re then into a low-code configuration environment.” Such solutions have an exponential effect on the tech transformation timeline. What’s sometimes slow to catch up is the culture of the organisation running it. “I’ve spent a fair few years doing large-scale, core system transformations, whether it's Guidewire, Duck Creek, Salesforce or any of the
Eye on the prize: It’s best to run the digital race in short, sharp sprints
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TheInsurtechMagazine | Issue 5
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