Erin Selfe is VP of IT and Corporate Officer at Pennsylvania Lumbermens Mutual Insurance Company. She has more than 15 years of experience in insurance and is responsible for every aspect of PLM’s IT environment. Before joining PLM, Ms. Selfe was the American European Insurance Group’s VP and CIO and held leadership roles at Philadelphia Insurance and Penn Mutual. She graduated summa cum laude from Portland State University.
What are your top priorities for the next 6-12 months?
Our key priority is in data management, specifically our business intelligence and data warehouse capabilities. When we completed our legacy core migration a few years ago, we had plugged everything into our old legacy reporting environment, so it’s time to update that.
We’re also looking at process efficiency opportunities. Given our niche, we underwrite high-premium, high-severity policies in our segment, so it’s a very hands-on process by design. STP isn’t a goal for us, but simply eliminating keystrokes and automating subprocesses creates a lot of value. We’re looking at the overall process and focusing on the small pieces that can be automated.
For example, we’re automating the intake of ACORD forms for new business, streamlining our AP processes, automating various renewal processes, etc.
What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen recently?
I’ve always looked at the pace of technology change and adoption within the insurance industry as being very slow, until about four or five years ago. Now it’s really accelerated; we’re moving quickly and focusing on keeping up. We’re figuring out how we can best take advantage of new technology developments and capabilities while taking care of traditional legacy issues. As a CIO, I’d say the environment is pleasantly challenging for our industry, and a welcome change from the past.
What do you see as some of the biggest challenges ahead?
The biggest ones are related to the pace of change, not just in technology, but in effective organizational change management. New technology creates opportunities for different ways of thinking and doing the work, but there’s effort involved in making those changes in an effective way.
Also, with some of the new technology providers, they have great and helpful technology, but a lot of them don’t always have a great understanding of the industry and its environment, including the regulatory environment. You end up having to educate your providers on insurance technology and regulatory issues as much as helping your internal people understand the technology changes.
In this new world, CIOs have to be educators, psychiatrists, and technologists all at once.
The next challenge is, with so much capability moving the cloud, it changes the dynamics and required skills of your team. Business analysis, vendor management, data, and integration architecture are more important than ever. On a small team, the skills balance is challenging to maintain. As an insurer, you’re competing for technology talent with other industries. I often have to sell the industry and educate potential hires on the new rate of change.
At the same time, we need to unite the strong development discipline and industry knowledge that exists on our teams with the newer environments and practices like DevOps and Agile in a primarily cloud-based environment. There’s a lot of dichotomy.
How do you see emerging technology affecting technology strategy in your business segments?
In a lot of areas, we’re leveraging technology from partners, and IT’s role is really to integrate and manage external capabilities rather than build. For example, predictive analytics in commercial auto. We brought in a partner and embedded the models directly into our underwriting processes, and that’s worked well. We’re also looking at fraud detection with AI. In loss control, we’re piloting satellite imagery and IoT such as boiler sensors.
Much of the emerging tech is via third-party integration in the cloud. Vendor partner management becomes a key function for IT. I meet quarterly with every critical vendor to go through service levels and delivery and to stay in touch with each company’s strategic and product roadmaps.
In this new world, and again, the availability of third-party vs. in-house development, resourcing is about the business case, not the capacity of our internal team. We’re much more “demand” based in terms of bringing in new capabilities that will create business value. If there’s a solid business case, we’ll bring in the right provider and leverage their team to deliver. It doesn’t make sense for smaller insurers to be artificially constrained by the “supply” of internal IT capabilities.
How have you and your team leveraged the Novarica relationship?
I’m a knowledge fanatic—I read every brief and report and like to learn from others. In addition, the engagement with the Novarica senior team and the peer networking has been invaluable to me.
I know I can pick up the phone and call an expert on the Novarica team or a peer and learn what I need.
As the rate of change accelerates, it’s great for me to have a partner that helps with the concepts, understand what’s going on, and learn from peers about what’s really happening. It’s also great to have Novarica’s expertise as part of those peer conversations.
Calls with the Novarica team have been really valuable for me and my business unit colleagues to confirm ideas, get a sanity check on the vendors in the market, and understand on what’s worked well for other companies. Getting a sense of vendors’ alignment and business fit in a single call is great—it saves me weeks of work.
We also engage with Novarica on broad strategic development issues and questions. Even at our Monday CEO meetings, I’ll bring Novarica reports to those meetings.
Add new comment