The organizational challenges involved in optimizing IT delivery were top of mind for the 20 insurer executives we recently hosted at our Regional Roundtable in Hartford, CT.
Insurers are making strides in adopting Agile and DevOps, and improving quality, efficiency, and alignment with key business needs. But just like legacy systems can hold back business innovation, legacy management practices can hold back technology innovation. Several participants described the challenges of retrofitting their Agile sprints or DevOps product ownership models into traditional waterfall-oriented budgets or PMO-driven management structures.
It’s ironic, because the Agile/DevOps model of product ownership can actually be much more aligned with business needs, in the same way that application portfolio management creates additional transparency for the relationship between systems and business use cases. But for many insurers, their management and budgeting practices haven’t caught up with their capabilities delivery practices.
This was echoed by the findings of our recent IT Budgets and Projects Study, which showed that insurer IT leaders’ biggest challenges are organizational (operations, talent, and resources) rather than technical.
Other topics of discussion included the challenges of operationalizing innovation, the continuing lack of effective data standards for external communication in some lines of business, the importance of leveraging business KPIs in developing IT value metrics, and the possible use cases for blockchain.
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