BLOGS

INSIGHTS

BLOGS

Author

March 27, 2019

Overcoming Legacy Constraints in Med Mal Insurance

Medical malpractice insurers face a unique set of business and technology issues. The sector is seeing continued consolidation and intense competition; the top 20 insurers now control 70% of premiums according to A.M. Best. Carriers are also facing a years-long decline of direct written premium. Compounding these market pressures are legacy environments that impede insurers’ ability to engage...

Read Full Post

Martin Higgins

March 26, 2019

The Rise of Software Product Management

A topic that we covered briefly in our recent webinar on Agile trends is the rise of software product management as a discipline in insurer organizations. The idea of product management is not new to the industry—many carriers have product management groups focused on their insurance products and also encounter product management specialists when working with software vendors. ...

Read Full Post

Martin Higgins

March 11, 2019

No silver bullets – the ancient wisdom still applies

As part of the follow-up to our recent Agile/DevOps webinar, I spoke with a life/annuities carrier struggling with stakeholder expectations related to its new Agile rollout. It’s a common “teething pain” with Agile—business was unhappy because the project was taking longer than the Agile team had estimated based on early requirements, which were high-level and half-baked. What was...

Read Full Post

Martin Higgins

March 1, 2019

Cloud PaaS: Opportunity for the Middle Market?

Insurers have many options to choose from when building out their cloud strategy. Easiest and most commonly deployed is still IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) which is frequently used to relocate on-premise applications to the cloud (known colloquially as the “lift and shift”). Also common is SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) products (Salesforce, Office365, Workday etc.), which is often...

Read Full Post

Martin Higgins

November 6, 2018

Who moved my cheese? Management and hierarchy in Agile transformation

The cultural benefits that accompany Agile transformations are well documented. Done right, Agile can work wonders for accountability, morale and overall employee engagement, especially in organizations bogged-down with heavyweight process, centralized governance and bureaucracy. There is a dark side though. One of the most powerful aspects of Agile is its hyper-focus on the team. The...

Read Full Post

Martin Higgins

October 23, 2018

Microservices and the Future of Service-Oriented Architecture

Microservices architecture has emerged as a technology trend to watch; some have gone as far as to say that microservices architecture is “SOA done right.” The reality, however, is much more nuanced. It’s true that service-oriented architecture failed to deliver in many areas, but it’s also clear that software development underwent some radical changes in its move toward Agile, DevOps, and...

Read Full Post

Martin Higgins

September 14, 2018

Are vendor issues opening the door for a return of the custom build?

My colleagues and I got together recently to discuss what we see trending in the P/C industry. Top of the list was the possible return of the core system custom build. Once widespread, core system builds fell out of favor during the highly competitive core vendor landscape that emerged in the early 2000s. The horror stories of cost overrun and missed expectations associated with a “build...

Read Full Post

Martin Higgins

September 9, 2018

Central vs. Decentralized Innovation

At Novarica, we talk a lot about innovation. It’s always been a hot topic, and interest has heightened since AM Best announced plans to update its scoring methodology to measure it. AM Best recognizes (like most of the industry) that a carrier’s ability to innovate effectively will be a significant factor separating the industry’s winners from the “also rans.” The most widespread approach...

Read Full Post

Martin Higgins

August 8, 2018

Who’s Really Doing Microservices?

With the hype trains, the exaggerated promises, and the inevitable under-delivery that seems to accompany most trending tech these days, it can be quite tough to work out what’s legitimately important and where things actually are in terms of market adoption. Such is the case with microservices, the trending architecture approach where systems are broken up into distinctly available and...

Read Full Post

Martin Higgins

July 13, 2018

Agility vs. Control: Agile, DevOps, and Microservices

One of the dilemmas that insurer CIO wrestle with is where to set the dial when it comes to agility vs. control in IT. Control in this context means governance, security, separation of concerns, change management, and so on. Agility is the opposite direction – lightweight governance, fewer barriers, right-sized security, and devolving decision-making down into the organization. Insurance,...

Read Full Post

Martin Higgins