Artificial Intelligence / Insurance

How Deep Learning is transforming the fabric of auto insurance and the challenges

In this article, we discuss the application of deep learning in the auto insurance industry, specifically in the areas of motor insurance and damage assessment. The focus will be on how autonomous vehicles are impacting the motor insurance field and the need for alternative careers as human-driven cars become obsolete. Additionally, we will explore the practical uses of deep learning in insurance, using the example of developing a classifier for vehicle damage assessment. Let’s begin by acknowledging the profound impact that autonomous vehicles are having on the motor insurance industry. As these self-driving cars become more prevalent, there is a...

Insurance / Quantum Computing / Strategy

Five Use Cases of Quantum Computing for Life Insurance Companies to be ready for the Quantum Future

As quantum computing continues to advance rapidly, life insurance companies must proactively prepare for the transformative impact it will have on their operations and industry as a whole. This article aims to provide strategies and recommendations for life insurance companies to navigate the quantum future successfully. 1. Embracing Quantum-Resistant Cryptography: Quantum computers pose a significant threat to traditional cryptographic algorithms used to secure sensitive data. Life insurance companies should invest in quantum-resistant encryption methods to safeguard customer information and policy data. Here are three key aspects to consider when exploring quantum-resistant cryptography: By proactively exploring and implementing quantum-resistant cryptography, life...

Artificial Intelligence / Big Data / Cloud Computing / Data Strategy / Digital Transformation / Insurance / Integrations / Leadership / Machine Learning / Modernizations / NOSQL / Strategy

A “member enrollment” challenge in group employee benefits that is far deep-rooted than was thought to be, and how a “next-gen” solution can fix it.

Why member enrollment is an area of concern! Member enrollment is a crucial business function in healthcare and insurance group benefits and is directly associated with customer experience. It influences the experiences of all major external personas in the following way: Eligible employees start receiving coverage protection only when successfully enrolled in the carrier’s system Employers depend on the successful completion of the enrollment process for determining premium installments and accounting Plan administrators get paid only when the enrollment process is complete Brokers receive commission only on successful completion of the enrollment process as the way to determine employee participation...

Digital Transformation / Insurance

Which 3 things make digital transformation the biggest concern for insurers, even more than the sluggish economy & low-interest rates?

Paper assets – Over decades, insurers accumulated paper assets that could stretch for miles. Most of those are confidential & must be archived for regulatory reasons. They require special storage & authorized access. Thus, managing these paper assets is cost-intensive & time-consuming which makes operations inefficient. At the same time, the digitization of paper assets of that scale is nearly impossible. Regulations – Insurers run in a highly regulated environment. There are stringent guardrails in trying new ideas, & restrictions in the use of PII, PCI, & PHI data. These limit capabilities in a lab environment which slows down innovations....

Digital Transformation / Strategy

What 4 things if not addressed can kill your microservices strategy?

Microservices provide freedom from the clutches of the “spaghetti monster” and lets us to the world of flexibility, scalability & agility, but they don’t come free. Here are 4 reasons why! 1. While microservices reduce the “impact” of IT changes through the separation of concerns they can increase the “frequency” of changes that can impact business in the absence of a right level of DevOps maturity, the severity of which rises exponentially as they grow in number. 2. Microservices are founded on the principles of “separation”. This means “isolation” is important in their management from people, process & technology standpoints....

Cloud Computing / Legacy / Migrations / Modernizations / Strategy

What workloads you must move to the Cloud – Part 3 (for Batch workloads)

Batch workloads date back to the early days of computation when mainframes dominated the computing world.  They still play a significant role in different disciplines including business, engineering, medical, healthcare, and other areas. Batch workloads are normally designed to run in the background and are meant to process huge amounts of data. What are the challenges of running batch workloads on-premise? 1. Poor customer experience Less availability of business functionality On-premise IT ecosystems typically have batch workloads that need an extensive amount of computing and storage provisioning. This is why real-time workloads cannot share environments with batch workloads due to...

Cloud Computing / Migrations / Modernizations / Strategy

What workloads you must move to the Cloud – Part 2 (for application resilience)

What is application resilience? How do we define application resilience! Application resilience is the ability of the application to tackle problems in one or more of its components without any degradation in its quality of service. A resilient application should be able to elastically handle failures and recover to its original state in a minimum time period. Resilience ensures that an application runs perfectly all the time, in other words, it makes the application reliable. Thus, reliability is the outcome, while resilience is the way to that outcome. What are the fundamental elements that build up application resilience? The key...

Scaling

Cloud Computing / Migrations / Modernizations / Strategy

What workloads you must move to the Cloud – Part 1 (for application scalability)

Many organizations, including a lot of those in Fortune 500, are running all or most of their business applications on-premise. These organizations have not considered moving their applications to the public cloud yet as a result of which they are unable to take advantage of the strategic advantages that public cloud offers in terms of performance & application scalability, reliability, cost-benefit, innovations, and operational excellence. What that leads to is that these organizations still grapple with issues that concern with application scalability, availability, high infrastructure costs, and limitations in business capabilities. Thus, if you are in charge of managing and...

Integrations / Migrations / Modernizations

Six things insurers must get right for platform modernization strategy

If you are responsible for platform modernization strategy for an organization that has been grappling with age-old legacy platforms, then this article is for you. Why platform modernization strategy is important? Platform modernization strategy for legacy applications is among the top priorities for insurance carriers. Insurance IT applications are traditionally run on old legacy platforms which is operationally painful in several ways in the context of a modern competitive market. Legacy platforms lead to low flexibility and poor agility that impact customer experience. The rigidity in these platforms results in high IT change management that substantially increases the operational latency...

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Legacy / Migrations / Modernizations

How lack of pre-analysis doubles or triples the costs for business rule extraction from legacy systems

Legacy platform modernization is one of the top IT priorities for most business organizations. It is a key strategy for organizations to stay relevant in the modern market. However, legacy modernization is typically a large and complex initiative. One of the reasons why legacy modernization is complex is because it typically involves business rule extraction from legacy systems. Business rule extraction from legacy mainframe systems has always been a complex task, involves a lot of unknowns, and the degree of accuracy is traditionally low. This makes it difficult to estimate what it takes to perform business rule extraction with reasonable...

Cloud Computing / Modernizations / Strategy

A 10-step guide to a reliable, repeatable & risk-optimized approach to cloud migration

A 10-step guide to a reliable, repeatable & risk-optimized approach to cloud migration. 1. Define business goals & KPIs to layout a clear definition of success. 2. Identify current-state roadblocks to the above goals. 3. Consider technology as table stake. Focus on people, processes, culture, and value of the existing IT landscape. 4. Set up a COE made up of reps from business, leadership, technology, cross-functional teams, to play the change agent within the organization. 5. Establish inventory of existing applications. Leverage 6R framework (Retain, Retire, Re-host, Re-architect, Re-platform, Rewrite) to identify what can stay on, what needs to change...

Cloud Computing / Data Strategy / Digital Transformation / Modernizations / Strategy

What is the future of RDBMS?

Serverless philosophy came a long way & likely to be the default architecture paradigm of the future. Currently, there are heavy uses of “serverless” for websites, applications, APIs, workflows & CDNs. In contrast, serverless RDBMSs are still not so widely used. While there are offerings like AWS Aurora (for MySQL), there are concerns in terms of security, access control, transaction mgmt, etc. As a result, RDBMSs still mostly get deployed either as on-prem or in VPC private subnets. But such deployments fail to align well with serverless apps & front-ends? Should then lambda functions with infinite scalability be allowed to...

Management / Strategy

An HBR tool to gauge effectiveness of teams for success

This HBR format of surveying effectiveness of teams looks relevant not just from a standpoint of small & dedicated teams but also from a risk mitigation perspective for massive enterprise-scale digital initiatives. This risk is in the fact that digital transformation projects are largely cross-functional. They span many functional areas or customer journeys within an enterprise. Thus, while such a digital initiative may have its own dedicated team, it also needs support from business leaders, analysts, IT teams, large-program managers, enterprise architects, infrastructure managers, executives, etc. from other functional areas. Data shows that 60-70% of digital transformation projects fail due...

Data Strategy / Insurance

What’s wrong with “data strategy” for insurers!

What can slow down “data” in insurance when data is always at its heart, from rating to risk management, customer service to claims! No wonder insurers have always been good at managing huge amounts of data. But as we know “what brought you here won’t take you there”, this ability needs to grow in today’s world when the very fabric of data has changed astronomically in its source, volume, variety, velocity, etc. Today insurers need new ways to use this “big” data to serve society better by keeping up with changing customer behaviors & trends. New technologies emerged to help....

Cloud Computing / Strategy

Why a Cloud COE is so critical for a successful cloud strategy!

A Cloud COE is critical for a successful cloud strategy. I have seen cloud migrations fail because they lacked a COE that could champion those. If we look at its nature, Cloud is not meant to be tactical, in contrast, it needs a strong strategic alignment with the enterprise with long-term implications. Any cloud adoption brings in a slice of digital transformation with new operating models & reusability that impact the whole enterprise. Thus there is a cross-functional aspect to it, meaning it needs active support from other functional teams. Cloud implementation, when done in a silo, would be a...

NOSQL

PUCCA – A five-dimensional evaluation framework to choose which among DynamoDB, Cassandra & MongoDB suits your workload!

I was struggling despite tons of internet materials about how to choose among DynamoDB, Cassandra & MongoDB for my workloads, due to lack of a simple/concise set of guidelines, that I can keep handy & use when I need to. So I created this acronym as PUCCA to help ask meaningful questions for the right evaluation which of these databases suit the need. Performance – What are my latency needs? Is a primary key available either in full or part, or do I need alternate indexes or table scans? How my READs & WRITEs will spike, are those predictable or...

Cloud Computing

Serverless Cloud Computing: Tech’s unsung hero!

This article is about the technologies that ruled 2019, and the hypes & the promises. Five names that kept buzzing in my ears through 2019 in the sphere of technology are AI, BlockChain, Serverless Cloud Computing, Quantum Computing, & Robotics. The question is, standing today which of these have been truly game-changers, & which are hypes at least from a near to long-term perspective! I think serverless cloud computing got the better of the rest of them significantly if we truly reflect from a utilitarian perspective. In my mind, serverless computing where you do not have to procure & manage...

Cloud Computing

Cloud trends that will define 2020

What’s your strategy for these “cloud” trends in 2020? 1. Multi-cloud- Not one cloud platform but the “best of the breed” approach will prevail. Customer-facing apps, business processes, analytics, & APIs running in disparate cloud platforms & seamlessly connected would be the new “normal”. 2. On-premise apps will be “truly” modernized to cloud-native apps for the real benefits of cloud adoption. AS-IS Lift & Shift, or data-center migrations alone are not likely to work anymore. 3. Re-skilling would remain high, not just for technical teams but also for business, PMs, sponsors, etc. since “cloud” transforms not just technology but also...