Cloud assessment and visioning lays groundwork for cloud transformation

Client background

Milliman IntelliScript® is the leading creator of risk-assessment insurtech for the U.S. life and health insurance sectors. For 20 years, Milliman has helped clients take on some of the world’s most critical and complex issues including retirement funding, healthcare financing, risk management, regulatory compliance, data analytics and business transformation. IntelliScript is part of Milliman, Inc., an independent risk management, benefits and technology firm.

The business challenge

Offering a variety of benefits like cost savings, efficiency and flexibility, the question is no longer whether or not cloud technology is right for your business, but rather when is the right time to move to the cloud and how should you go about it? This is exactly where Milliman IntelliScript found themselves, but they realized they didn’t fully understand what that entailed. To better understand the benefits, considerations and impacts before moving forward, Milliman engaged Baker Tilly to conduct a cloud assessment and visioning lab to answer their questions surrounding their cloud journey and to explore utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Strategy and solution

Milliman wanted to learn what moving to the cloud would really mean for their company, including answering questions like:

• Why should our business move to AWS?
• How can we leverage cloud technology to drive growth?
• What are the potential impacts to our company if we move to the cloud?
• Who are the stakeholders involved and/or affected?
• What are our critical requirements?

In order to help the client answer these questions for their business and ensure they gained the most value out of this workshop, we first began by doing a deep dive into Milliman’s current state operations to better understand the role data and technology plays in their company.

Through our three-step process of discover, ideate and advocate, we look to help our clients think through their most ambiguous questions in order to turn them into high impact actionable next steps for applying transformational cloud technology to their business.

Beginning with the first step of discover, Milliman posed the question, “What does moving to AWS really mean for our company?” In breakout groups consisting of their product and development, analytics, infrastructure and engineering and security teams, we began the ideate step by asking them to think about all of the ways that AWS technology could drive business value for Milliman, like increased speed & efficiency, access to better insights, reduced costs and better security, to name a few. Once the benefits were outlined, we then helped the client begin to consider the potential impacts moving to AWS could have on their business, such as processes/governance, skills and current application builds.

After reaching a better understanding about possible impacts, we then helped the client think through their critical requirements and how much of a disruption it might cause to their business. In the final step, advocate, our team consolidated all these insights that came out of these discussions and brought Milliman our recommended next steps.

After engaging in a cloud assessment and visioning lab, Milliman had a concrete, actionable plan to move forward in their cloud transformation journey.