The insurance industry is facing pressure to innovate to keep up with evolving customer expectations for technology, driven by digital disruption across the entire economy. Policyholders want rapid, personalized, omnichannel experiences like those they get from tech leaders in banking and e-commerce. Meanwhile, insurers are struggling with rigid, dated IT environments that hinder their agility and ability to rapidly develop new capabilities.

This report discusses how insurers can adopt an incremental IT modernization approach to prioritize quick wins balanced with long-term technical debt reduction. It considers architectural, coding, and operational strategies for unwinding complexity at both the enterprise and system levels, offering best practices on defining target architectures, building roadmaps, identifying focus areas, and integrating modernization into governance. This report is based on Datos Insights’ examination of legacy modernization efforts and challenges among insurance firms and other industries along with additional research and analysis. Conversations with technology leaders provided insights into lessons learned.

Clients of Datos Insights’ Property & Casualty and Life, Annuities, & Benefits services can download this report.