CIOs rely on a set of foundational leadership principles, IT management and delivery practices, and emerging technologies that are critical to running an effective IT organization, achieving business outcomes, and preserving responsiveness and innovation.
Successful CIOs have strategies across all three dimensions, since elements of all three are vital to successful IT organization. The best technology is useless without the talent to run it. A skilled IT unit needs good practices to deliver consistent results. And any business function, even one that’s led and managed well, needs the right tools to succeed.
Leadership forms the building blocks of CIOs’ strategies for delivering business value and creating dynamic organizations staffed by empowered employees.
- Alignment to other units, often facilitated by explaining technology initiatives with the right business metrics, is necessary to position IT as a capability enabler, rather than a cost center.
- Talent, the critical success factor for any IT organization, is a major challenge for insurers, but one that few truly prioritize.
- Innovation is vital in a world of emerging technology, where business as usual can be a history lesson. But the right executive sponsorship and organizational attitude are key to wider adoption.
Practices define how a technology organization will deliver on business needs; they establish strategic direction and enable agility.
- Agile/DevOps are new modes of IT delivery which aim to break down silos to create better responsiveness and avoid lost time due to handoffs or miscommunications.
- Enterprise architecture and master data management can create consistency in increasingly complex internal technological environments and enable easier integration to external apps.
- Customer experience recognizes that external processes need to be streamlined and that policyholders’ standards for ease and intuitiveness has changed as the world has gone digital.
Technology is a challenge for many insurers as they modernize legacy environments, but CIOs also need to understand emerging technologies that are becoming widely adopted.
- Cloud adoption has increased steadily, and many insurers are considering it for core deployments as they seek to simplify internal infrastructure and increase productivity.
- Microservices technology, nearing ubiquity among insurers, can help integrate systems and externalize functions to facilitate new business and customer services transactions.
- Evolving platforms include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation, which insurers are leveraging to automate and improve decisioning.
Balance among all these foundations is crucial, which speaks to the breadth of the CIO’s responsibilities.
Novarica’s recent report on CIO foundations discusses these fundaments alongside research on insurer activities, budgets, and projects. For more on the report, or to discuss these ideas further, feel free to contact me at [email protected].
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