Legacy Modernization Imperatives for the Insurance Industry

Transcription

1 Legacy Modernization Imperatives for the Insurance Industry Ritu Gupta >> Head Insurance Vertical Thought Paper

2 CONTENTS Overview 3 The New Insurance Industry Mantra 3 Key Challenges In Legacy Modernization 4 Knowledge Institutionalization 5 Data Driven Approach 5 Conclusion 6

3 Overview In the insurance industry, operating ratios continue to stay high, competition is even more cutthroat, and pressure on margins remains unrelenting. On the one hand, multiple mergers and acquisitions have given rise to a plethora of processes and multiple systems serving similar purposes. On the other, the emergence of new, disruptive technologies such as cloud, mobility, and big data has ceded the market to the caprices of the end customer. According to Forrester Consulting, Legacy Modernization is a top priority for CIOs with 49% of firms increase spending on legacy modernization. Though the Insurance industry was one of the earlier adopters of technology; it has been a laggard in adopting newer technologies. This early adoption with subsequent restrain has saddled this industry with a plethora of legacy application that holds decades of data and hard coded business rules. These early investments are acting like shackles restraining the industry from welcoming the possibilities thrown up by new age technologywith open arms. Adding to the woes of the industry are stringent compliance requirements, shrinking IT budgets, the resultant need to optimize costs and improve operational efficiency, improve time to market on product changes and addition of new products and increased pressure to improve underwriting ratios. With the existing legacy technology, business as usual is no longer possible. Depressed investment incomes with continually challenged underwriting ratios have put an increasing pressure on the industry to evolve continuously. Whilst insurers deliberate and define new products and new business models, speed to market gets heavily impacted by the customary legacy landscape that most insurers are laden with. Whilst modernization has been an area of focus for many insurers for quite some time, recent times and its turbulences have created a sense of urgency around enhancing the capabilities of business processes and the underlying systems that support these business processes. The industry is acknowledging that to survive in the market, they need to adoptnew, emerging technology and replace their existing core systems to make way for business agility. Having said that, the scale of operations is too humungous for even the most profitable insurance company to rip and replace the existing set up. Legacy Modernization continues to be seen as a more viable option than legacy replacement. Legacy Modernization means different things to different people.this paper will not get into the intricacies of what constitutes legacy modernization, it would touch upon the challenges and common pitfalls encountered by insurance companies engaging in a legacy modernization project, and provide suggestions on how best these can be tackled effectively. The New Insurance Industry Mantra For the Insurance Industry, Business Agility is no longer a competitive strategy, it has become a survival strategy. FUNCTIONALITY CONFIGURABILITY AGILITY 3

4 CHALLENGES POSED BY LEGACY SYSTEMS Speed to market o new products, o new Rate structure o new processes o Changes to existing products Scarcity of talent Resources with expertise in legacy technology are retiring from the work force. Since universities don t teach legacy technology there is a scarcity of resources who can work on these systems. High maintenance costs especially around infrastructure Key Challenges in Legacy Modernization Gartner estimates that, by 2014, only 50% of global insurers' legacy modernization programs will generate originally expected measurable organizational value. Since a large percentage of system transformation projects fail, Life and P&C insurers will require best practices to mitigate some of the risks of legacy modernization. Most insurers are not in a position to opt for a full-fledged end-to-end approach when it comes to modernizing their legacy IT systems. Budgetary constraints and risk aversion are the two primary causes for the above. The big bang approach is extremely expensive, long drawn and has the potential to seriously impact the availability & dependability of the IT Landscape. Yet, insurers have no choice but to modernize their systems. Competitive pressure necessitates launch of newer products or newer variations of existing products and the ability to continually push them in the market. Legacy landscape not only hindersthe same but also brings with it huge maintenance costs, andchallenges in accessing talent due to the scarce availability of resources with these skillsets... Customers today expect to be able to access services online. This requires insurance carriers to be able to integrate their portal solutions with their legacy systems which can be a challenging exercise. Thus, the need to modernize legacy systems cannot be overemphasized. However, each insurer has its own respective context within which this modernization has to take place and each legacy modernization program has its own unique challenges and failure points. However, there are some common safeguards that can enhance the likelihood of success of a modernization program. Business ownership and Integrated Program Management approach It is absolutely critical that Legacy Modernization is taken as a well thought out, integrated program that takes into account the needs and contradictions of each category of stakeholder. The Business case, program objectives and strategy to achieve the same should be clearly articulated in a well document Program Plan. Any project therein should be aligned to this overall program strategy and should be evaluated in terms of its ability to meet the program objectives. There is a need to have defined intermediate checkpoints wherein the Business case is reviewed and program recalibrated to ensure that the program is kept current in terms of its purpose and business alignment. Many insurers,however, adopt a piecemeal approach to legacy programs. Various business units within the organization take on modernization projects based on their immediate requirements. Contradictory approaches are sometimes taken up with one team looking at consolidating existing applications, another possibly wanting to replace a similar system with a modern day avatar. These two teams might be working on similar modernization programs within different parts of the same company with no communication links between them. This leads to both operational inefficiencies as well as to increased exposure of failure due to contradiction. Another critical element that gets missed and has a massive impact on the program; on taking this piece meal approach is, effective and efficient interface conversions as the impact of each change on the overall IT landscape has not been accounted for. Finally, lack of defined business case with measurable RoIleads to lack of business sponsorship of the program and/or the projects thus causing immense delays and resistance to change. This last part has been one of the biggest causes of program delays and sometimes failure. Legacy modernization is often seen as an IT program as against a Business Program. This leads to primarily the following set of problems; a) Business users/sponsors do not give requisite priority to the program and massive delays creep in due to the same 4

5 b) Business users do not take the program seriously till almost the application is ready and fail to give complete integrated requirements during the early stages of the projects thus causing significant re-work c) In times of budgetary constraints, these projects, being seen as discretionary, are the first to be put on hold/shelved Thus, considering the shrinking IT budgets and increasing pressure on IT to help deliver on business objectives, the first important step is to look at the IT landscape within the organization in its entirety. After due diligence and analysis of the as-is and to-be state an enterprise wide plan needs to be strategized. Measures should be taken to put in place an integrated dashboard to provide near real time reports on the progress and take proactive measures where necessary Most insurers continue to struggle with legacy systems and IT modernization. Initiatives to reduce the cost of maintenance, overcome resource limitations and improve business performance continue with Tier 1 and Tier 2 property and casualty and life insurers. Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, Gartner -- Legacy Modernization and Core System Issues Among P&C and Life Insurers More often than not, there is no single knowledge repository or system map that provides an insight into the as-is state. A large chunk of the information exists only in the mind of the individuals responsible for that particular system and process. This creates a huge dependence on these resources as the knowledge will be irretrievably lost if the individual retires or moves to another organization. Many legacy modernization/ replacement programs have been severely impacted due to various unknowns that crop up whilst the program is underway; which was not accounted for in the estimation and/or blueprint design. Business owned applications, almost defunct systems that are used in some extreme outlier condition, often very different from what the documentation of the application states, etc. are some of such unknowns that typically face the transformation managers. Insurers need to identity these gaps during the discovery phase, put in place a mechanism to capture such knowledge, and map it into the new applications during the modernization exercise. Template based frameworks and impact analysis tools can accelerate this process significantly. An in-depth analysis based on established practices is required to fully map and capture knowledge from the existing apps. All thisknowledge once captured and categorized needs to be maintained for maintenance and future transformations. Knowledge Institutionalization Knowledge Management has always been a challenged area in the insurance industry as inmost established insurance companies, the original legacy applications would have evolved over the years based on emerging requirementsthat were rarely accompanied with the associated documentation updates. Data Driven Approach In Insurance, like in anyfinancial service industry, data equals money. However, one typical problem faced in Legacy applications is the quality of data. Data duplicity, redundancy and quality are typical challenges that any program that requires a peek into the data faces. A well-documented data strategyis essential to ensure efficiency and quality of data conversion. 5

6 Especially in life insurance, where data has been kept for generations at times, data conversion has much larger challenges. However, given that most life platforms have the capability to create backdated products and transactions, data conversion approach that does a policy lifecycle conversion (cycle up the active policies from its transaction history) instead of point in time data conversion can simplify the process significantly and have much of the data problems eliminated as part of the conversion exercise. Typical challenges in data conversion Estimation of time and effort required Inaccuracies that have crept in over the years Data not reproducible or traceable Low quality of data In the non-life category, however, data conversion and migration challenges are more around planning. What needs to be converted and what is good enough to be archived? Major challenges to this come from the following: The documentation problem that we discussed earlier plagues this area as well. In the case of a system consolidation project, in the legacy stage the data might have resided in multiple systems and now would need to be consolidated in a single new system. The lack of documentation makes this a risky and difficult task. Insurers need to ensure that the data is migrated in its entirety and accurately while ensuring that the conversion is traceable and manageable. Additionally, as programs modernize their systems by switching to more flexible distributed solutions, they look at new ways of doing business to make the best use of their investment. For example an organization may be able to now introduce new predictive models elements into their rating system which they could not do earlier in the legacy system due to the challenges in adding new fields. While this can be an exciting option from a business perspective it introduces an additional layer of complexity when trying to convert data from thelegacy system into the new system. Sometimes the success or failure of these is predominantly dependent on efficiently managing the change communication and acceptance of change. This then should an integral part of the program. Business owned apps are never accounted for in totality. The business would have created hundreds of apps to massage the data. During the course of an integration exercise, the realization about the unaccounted data strikes hard. This is one of the key reasons for scope and cost escalations. Conclusion Though, one can never ensure the success of a legacy modernization program, some of the best practices that have contributed to success of modernization programs are: Business Ownership Resource strategy to meet ramp up and ramp down requirements Competency framework to develop talent for both the existing technology and new technology Clearly defined Business case with explicit RoI expectations and intermediate checkpoints Knowledge management strategy to ensure all variations and interfaces are documented Dashboard developed to monitor both progress and quality of program Stakeholders and their responsibilities clearly articulted with explicit escalation mechanism for delays and denials Conduct organizational awareness and develop readiness for change Business approved Data strategy outlining what to convert & how much to convert 6

7 About the Author Ritu Gupta heads the Insurance Practice at NIIT Technologies. She has over 17 years of experience, including 11 years in insurance domain and about seven years in management consultancy. She has been instrumental in setting up of Vantage Center of Excellence at NIIT Technologies. She has a post graduation degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. About NIIT Technologies NIIT Technologies is a leading IT solutions organization, servicing customers in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. It offers services in Application Development and Maintenance, Enterprise Solutions including Managed Services and Business Process Outsourcing to organisations in the Financial Services, Travel & Transportation, Manufacturing/Distribution, and Government sectors. With employees over 8,000 professionals, NIIT Technologies follows global standards of software development processes. Over the years the Company has forged extremely rewarding relationships with global majors, a testimony to mutual commitment and its ability to retain marquee clients, drawing repeat business from them. NIIT Technologies has been able to scale its interactions with marquee India NIIT Technologies Ltd. Corporate Heights (Tapasya) Plot No. 5, EFGH, Sector 126 Noida-Greater Noida Expressway Noida , U.P., India Ph: Fax: Americas NIIT Technologies Inc., 1050 Crown Pointe Parkway 5 th Floor, Atlanta, GA 30338, USA Ph: Toll Free: NIIT Fax: clients in the BFSI sector, the Travel Transport & Logistics and Manufacturing & Distribution, into extremely meaningful, multi-year "collaborations. NIIT Technologies follows global standards of development, which include ISO 9001:2000 Certification, assessment at Level 5 for SEI-CMMi version 1.2 and ISO information security management certification. Its data center operations are assessed at the international ISO IT management standards. Europe NIIT Technologies Limited 2 nd Floor, 47 Mark Lane London - EC3R 7QQ, U.K. Ph: Fax: Singapore NIIT Technologies Pte. Limited 31 Kaki Bukit Road 3 #05-13 Techlink Singapore Ph: Fax: A leading IT solutions organization 21 locations and 16 countries 8000 professionals Level 5 of SEI-CMMi, ver1.2 ISO certified Level 5 of People CMM Framework Write to us at marketing@niit-tech.com D_33_190313