Britta Schatz is the Chief Information Office for Penn National Insurance. Britta joined Penn National in 2002 as an IT Consultant, and was promoted to CIO in 2011. Britta has held various leadership positions in the IT departments of P/C insurance companies for over 30 years, nearly half of those in various positions at PHICO Insurance Company. Her expertise includes strategic planning, IT operations, project management, and application design/development. She also has experience in enterprise architecture, business process management, data management, and business. Britta was interviewed for the Novarica Update in 2018.
How has your role changed recently?
We recently re-organized our IT group into three areas, each with a VP-level leader: IT operations and development, information security, and an enterprise PMO. This has allowed me to improve my focus on security issues, and strategic issues like innovation and InsureTech, as well as our core systems transformation.
On that front, we’re more than halfway through a policy admin system implementation, and we’re also implementing a cloud service for ERP and CRM. Plus we’re upgrading our billing system.
Having an enterprise PMO in place to manage this transformation has been critical. We’ve got a lot more discipline around projects than we used to. We’re implementing a portfolio management process, so the business unit teams are prioritizing and ranking their projects, and we have much more transparency.
We’ve also been able standardize our project and program processes and documentation, and professionalize our project management capabilities. We’re really upping our game here across the organization.
You mentioned focusing more on Security as well.
With the NY DFS regulations and the NAIC adoption of the data security model law, we needed to make sure we had everything documented to show that we’re taking a risk-based approach to information security. We’ve been growing skills in that area, we’ve recently hired a security architect, and we’ll be hiring another information security manager.
What kinds of things are you doing in the Innovation area?
We’ve already run a proof-of-concept project for RPA, and we’re now initiating another three projects where we hope to prove the value. We’re talking with several InsureTech companies for proof-of-concept initiatives as well. We’re working with vendor clients on claims analytics and analytics modeling processes, and machine learning capabilities in particular. We’re also looking at possibly using chatbots and AI in the contact center.
We’re taking a more active stance on managing our innovation activities. We’re trying to put some discipline around what we’re doing and how we keep everyone informed. We want to make sure that we’re sharing information internally to make sure everyone’s taking advantage and we’re getting value out of those relationships.
Have attitudes about technology evolved recently?
Definitely. It used to be that our strategic planning exercises mostly considered IT as a separate issue. But now, it’s deeply integrated with our strategic plan. Every business unit has asks that are beyond our capacity to get done, which means we have to think about how we deliver projects, and who we can partner with. We’re looking at different kinds of vendor partners than we used to. We never would have looked at the size of companies that are in the InsureTech category before. But there’s such a demand now for new capabilities, we’re more willing to consider different types of partners.
How have you and your team leveraged the Novarica relationship?
We’ve used Novarica’s consulting services for software selection and for project assessments to give an external assessment on how our large projects are going. Our team finds the research valuable in terms of vendor information as well as general trends and best practices. Plus Novarica’s team members are great speakers to keep our leadership and board of directors up to date on the latest issues in the industry.
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