As we close the book on 2022, it’s perhaps appropriate to consider how different the year we are entering will be from the past years we remember fondly. For insurance carrier IT organizations, planning for the future now will be key. As the quote typically attributed to Winston Churchill goes, “Generals are always ready to fight the last war.” The corporate equivalent of this is to think that a post-pandemic era will look like 2019.
From work that the Aite-Novarica Group Insurance practice has done, the list of differences is long and rich. Digital experiences will be critical to future success, with user experience and customer experience investments prominent for a world that’s increasingly oriented toward self-service. The useful life of technology is getting progressively shorter, with significant implications for both architectural and financial models.
Demographic shifts are continuing to be seismic, with clear implications for talent management—and perhaps even more significant, if less well understood, implications for knowledge management. A CIO I spoke with recently noted that in the back half of 2022, 30% of his senior leadership team retired. Let that sink in for a minute. Replacing human capital is one thing, but the loss of institutional memory is an order of magnitude more challenging. Avoiding the corporate equivalent of a Maginot Line is now a serious issue. Companies need to be far more situationally aware and prepared to adapt as new facts present themselves.
This can also be true in our personal lives. Over the recent Thanksgiving Day holiday, my family decided to get ready for Christmas with the annual decorating of our tree. It’s a fun event that my wife/best friend and I have done on our own in North Carolina since our children have established their own families in Boston and San Francisco. The difference this year was an accidental FaceTime call in the middle of the decorating ceremony. The Boston Boys were excited to be part of it all, asking me to hold each ornament in front of the camera before suggesting placement on the tree, all from 750 miles away.
In 2019, this call would have led us to stop and single thread activities. Situational awareness combined with dramatically improved technical capabilities led to a completely new and exciting experience to be remembered by all.
What other new things are on this side of the calendar flip? The Aite-Novarica Group Insurance practice is relaunching our in-person spring CIO Council Meeting, for one. To learn more and to request an invitation, visit our CIO Council Meeting site. If you’d like to discuss what’s on the horizon for insurance IT leaders in more detail, please let me know at [email protected].