Insurance firm assesses strategy to prioritize IT focus 

Client background

This company is one of the largest national insurers of religious organizations of all denominations with 1,170 employees throughout the country.

The business challenge

The company understood the need for significant technology modernization projects and wanted assistance in updating their three-to-five-year IT strategy. As they had multiple IT leaders with differing opinions on how to prioritize next steps, they were looking for external support to help facilitate the process. The company wanted to ensure the IT strategy was developed in alignment with their organizational strategy, while also bringing everyone across the organization on the same page.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly supported the company in prioritizing next steps by walking through a strategic assessment and road map development project. The strategic assessment identified what the company was doing from a current state perspective and where they wanted to be in their desired future state by having company leadership score different technology capabilities based on their current effectiveness and their importance in the desired future state. This worked to quantify the gaps between their current and future state across the various IT leaders and helped prioritize which capabilities to focus on in order to construct a road map of project initiatives to support the company as they transition from current to future state. As a result of the assessment, the following capabilities were identified as focus areas:

1. Core business application modernization: Core applications had reached end of life, adding significant enterprise risk and constraining product and services innovation.
2. Customer/broker digital experience: Sub-standard customer/broker digital experience leading to growth areas being under served from a digital perspective.
3. IT operating model: The current IT operating model had a limited business advisor focus and significant room for improvement.
4. Data architecture and integration: Data architecture was not manageable with prevalent data quality issues and an inability to efficiently integrate systems.
5. Advanced analytics: Analytics was not a core competency and with no single source of truth, data and information could not be leveraged for competitive advantage.

As a result of this engagement, the company gained a series of prioritized road map initiatives that, if implemented, would support the company in achieving their desired future state through a variety of modernized technology assets. Some future state capabilities the company would gain are:

1. Core business application modernization: A modernized application portfolio that reduces security and stability risk and supports product and service innovation.
2. Customer/broker digital experience: A customer/broker digital strategy that enables growth and retention to achieve market parity in customer/broker digital experience.
3. IT operating model: An optimized IT operating model with business, function and channel specialization, creating an IT department focused on enabling business transformation.
4. Data architecture and integration: A modernized enterprise data architecture to reduce data quality issues and support system integration.
5. Advanced analytics: An increased importance on analytics creating results that are trusted and that can assist with establishing a competitive advantage.