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Modernize Your Applications for Insurance

Continuously modernize – today’s modern application is tomorrow’s shelfware.

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  • Application modernization is essential to stay competitive and productive in today’s digital environment. This is done while taking into account security, data privacy, and compliance.
  • Your application portfolio cannot sufficiently support the flexibility and efficiency the business needs because of legacy challenges. Speed to market is critical to preserving or improving market share.
  • Application rationalization is also critical because most insurers' ecosystems are a mixture of systems that have come in through acquisitions.
  • For the insurance industry application modernization programs are multi-year that are plagued with significant risks of cost and time overruns.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • Build your digital applications around continuous modernization. End-user needs, technology, business direction, and regulations change rapidly in today’s competitive and fast-paced industry. Insurance companies need to focus on innovation for improving customer experience and product design, making products and services accessible across digital channels. Build continuous modernization into the center of your digital application vision to keep up with evolving business, end-user, and IT needs.
  • Application modernization is organizational change management. If you build and modernize it, they may not come. The crux of successful application modernization is the strategic, well-informed, and onboarded adoption of changes in key business areas, capabilities, and processes. Organizational change management must be front and center so that applications are fit for purpose and are something that end users want and need to use.
  • Business-IT collaboration is not optional. Application modernization will not be successful if your lines of business (LOBs) and IT are not working together. IT must empathize with how LOBs operate and proactively support the underlying operational systems. LOBs must be accountable for all products leveraging modern technologies and be able to rationalize the technical feasibility of their digital application vision.
  • Understand where and when to modernize. Factors to be considered includes the size and complexity of IT’s infrastructure, budget and timeline for modernization, and company’s willingness to take risks.

Impact and Result

  • Establish the digital application vision. Gain a grounded understanding of the digital application construct and prioritize these attributes against your digital business goals.
  • Define your modernization approach. Obtain a thorough view of your business and technical complexities, risks, and impacts. Employ the right modernization techniques based on your organization’s change tolerance.
  • Build your roadmap. Clarify the organizational changes needed to support modernization and adoption of your digital applications. Continuously evaluate the impact of your modernization project to help ensure that you’re staying on track.

Modernize Your Applications for Insurance Research & Tools

1. Modernize Your Applications for Insurance – An approach to strategically modernize your applications, through the lens, constraints, and unique characteristics of the insurance industry.

Application leaders in Insurance have a need to invest in modernization initiatives to improve the value of their legacy applications to support their digital transformation, though they face unique challenges and constraints to do so. The Modernize Your Applications for Insurance blueprint supports their modernization goals and objectives, bringing increased value to benefit the communities they serve.

2. Modernize Your Applications for Insurance Communication Template – Craft a compelling narrative for key decision makers in charting your path to application modernization.

The Modernize Your Applications for Insurance Communication Template defines the rationale and initiatives needed to successfully modernize through business and IT collaboration. It builds a convincing case for your stakeholders that is centered on business value. Use this template as part of the blueprint Modernize Your Applications for Insurance.

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Modernize Your Applications for Insurance

Continuously modernize – today’s modern applications are tomorrow’s shelfware.

Executive Brief

Analyst Perspective

Focus modernization on organizational value delivery.

Ricardo de Oliveira

Today’s modern applications are tomorrow’s shelfware. They will gradually lose their value, and the supporting technologies will become obsolete. Therefore, modernization is a continuous need. Many decision makers struggle, however, to determine when and how to modernize continuously, given the perceived risk and high investment required. But this does not have to be the case.

Focus modernization on the capabilities and functions that matter to your business so you can strengthen the case for further modernization efforts and build trust with all stakeholders. Your goal is to deliver changes that will benefit your entire organization, not just a single business or IT unit.

The insurance industry is undergoing rapid change, requiring adaptability and the use of agile methodologies for success. Insurance innovation is focused on enhancing customer experience and personalizing products, driven by convenience and accessibility.

To remain competitive and meet evolving customer needs, insurance companies are under pressure to adopt new technologies. The industry's complex and ever-changing regulatory landscape adds further challenges, as insurers must navigate varying requirements across jurisdictions, continuously evolving regulations on data privacy and security. Traditional insurers are facing difficult decisions and choices in this evolving environment.

Ricardo de Oliveira

Research Director, Application Delivery and Application Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

  • Application modernization is essential to stay competitive and productive in today’s digital environment. This needs to be done while taking into account security, data privacy, and compliance.
  • Your application portfolio cannot sufficiently support the flexibility and efficiency that the business needs because of legacy challenges. Speed to market is critical for preserving or improving market share.
  • Application rationalization is also critical because most insurers' ecosystems are a mixture of systems that have come in through acquisitions.
  • For the insurance industry, application modernization programs are multiyear and plagued with a significant risk of cost and time overruns.

Common Obstacles

  • Legacy applications are cemented in corporate culture, and the company’s leadership and some users are unwilling to change. However, customers require solutions that your current technology cannot support.
  • Without a clear focus on organizational needs, decisions about what and how to modernize can become complicated. Politics and bureaucracy creep into the decision-making process and plans that are not beneficial to all stakeholders are generated.
  • Competing and conflicting priorities may undermine modernization value by focusing on approaches that would benefit only one customer group rather than the entire organization.

Info-Tech’s Approach

  • Establish a digital application vision. Gain a grounded understanding of the digital application construct, and prioritize these attributes against your digital business goals.
  • Define your modernization approach. Obtain a thorough view of your business and technical complexities, risks, and impacts. Employ the right modernization techniques based on your organization’s change tolerance.
  • Build your roadmap. Clarify the organizational changes needed to support modernization and the adoption of your digital applications. Continuously evaluate the impact of your modernization project to help ensure that you are staying on track.

Insight Summary

  • Build your digital applications around continuous modernization. End-user needs, technology, business direction, and regulations change rapidly in today’s competitive and fast-paced industry. Insurance companies need to focus on innovation for improving customer experience and product design, making products and services accessible across digital channels. Build continuous modernization into the center of your digital application vision to keep up with evolving business, end-user, and IT needs.
  • Application modernization is organizational change management. If you build and modernize it, they may not come. For successful application modernization, there must be strategic, well-informed, and onboarded adoption of changes in key business areas, capabilities, and processes. Organizational change management must be front and center so that applications are fit for purpose and are something that end users want and need to use.
  • Business-IT collaboration is not optional. Application modernization will not be successful if your lines of business (LOBs) and IT are not working together. IT must empathize with how LOBs operate and proactively support the underlying operational systems. LOBs must be accountable for all products leveraging modern technologies and be able to rationalize the technical feasibility of their digital application vision.
  • Understand where and when to modernize. Factors to be considered include the size and complexity of IT’s infrastructure, budget and timeline for modernization, and your company’s willingness to take risks.

Understand the digital umbrella.

“Going digital” is about much more than strategy and a few new apps.

It requires a complete reinvention of how business and IT operate: integrated teams that deliver their products and services to their customers preferentially through technology.

Digital Strategy Umbrella includes: Digital principals, and Organizational goals.
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About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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Authors

Ricardo de Oliveira

Andrew Kum-Seun

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