Insurer IT practice initiatives innovate at the organizational level. By their nature, they’re broader than digital, data, or core projects. Examples can include investments in infrastructure or workflow that enable new capabilities, organizational learning programs to standardize onboarding and training, or high school and college internship partner programs that cultivate new talent.
Aite-Novarica Group’s 11th annual Insurance Impact Awards program reviewed 65 examples of insurer IT initiatives that delivered real business impact; this year’s report on IT practices includes nine case studies. Each of these projects was supporting a different business goal, but distinct trends emerged across these case studies.
IT practice initiatives improve efficiency by creating standardization.
This year’s case studies reflect the impact insurers can create by bringing discipline to complex processes, such as product rollout, partner integration, and change management. These efforts create business value by promoting reuse, limiting one-off work, and creating a standard practice.
For example, Acrisure developed a standard framework to integrate acquired business entities in its technology platform and executed consolidation, cybersecurity, and integration projects. The program enabled the insurer to consolidate 50% of its business to common platforms in two years, creating US$4.3 million in annualized savings.
Most IT practice initiatives focus on how tools are used and how work gets done.
IT practice initiatives often focus on informing how project teams collaborate internally as well as how they collaborate with business partners. Practices of this type can improve communication and ensure final projects meet business needs.
Amerisure, for instance, expanded its strong Agile practices by establishing dedicated Agile teams and automated its software development via DevOps practices to improve delivery speed for business and technology solutions. The initiative improved average time to market by 13% for solutions and 34% for non-project work requests.
IT practice initiatives can add substantial value.
Articulating the value of IT practice initiatives in hard metrics can be challenging as they often require rethinking business processes and innovating organizationally. Many key performance indicators (KPIs) may not directly translate. Nevertheless, successful IT practice initiatives can create substantial benefits by reducing friction, improving agility, and disseminating knowledge across the whole enterprise.
Knights of Columbus established and scaled an intelligent automation program to reduce manual processing, save costs, and create efficiency. Matured over two years, the program has processed more than 260,000 transactions, saved more than 13,000 hours in manual processing, and realized more than US$1.2 million in annual savings.
Our 2022 Insurance Technology Impact Case Study Compendium on IT Practice Initiatives outlines nine total case studies, providing concrete examples of ways insurers can leverage technology to create business value. Access to the report can be found here, and companion volumes on digital, data, and core projects are also available.