How Insurance CIOs Can Lead Digital Transformation – Cognizant

Article Synopsis :

Going digital means rapidly evolving in an agile, cost effective and user friendly way. Insurance CIOs need to adopt new work styles and mindsets, including collaborative partnerships and an eye for innovation. Cognizant’s “How Insurance CIOs Can Remake Themselves to Lead Digital Transformation” aims to help CIOs succeed in this new context.

Insurance CIOs are custodians of legacy systems and change agents in the digital age 

In late 2016, Cognizant surveyed 200 CIOs in North America across banking, P&C insurance, healthcare and the life sciences industries. This report focuses exclusively on the responses provided by 50 CIOs from the P&C insurance industry.

The survey reveals most CIOs, not surprisingly, still operate in their comfort zone, no matter how much they feel the need to digitally transform.

The industry, based on the survey responses, does realise the importance of digital transformation and that digitisation is about more than automation. The top 3 digital priorities cited carrying the highest ROIs include, 1) Usage-based insurance, 2) Omni-channel experience across devices, and 3) Robo-advisers.

According to 78% of respondents, the CIO will evolve as a digital strategist and transformation leader, while also working at the executive level as a functional leader running IT. Key skills in high demand for emerging CIOs include:

1. A Partnership-Driven, Collaborative Approach: CIOs must be able to collaborate with organisation-wide CxOs to create a digital road map leveraging technology investments and delivery capabilities. Collaboration could be around customer experience, customer-centric KPIs, and innovation workshops. Another level of collaboration can and should be with technology start-ups.
2. An Eye for Innovation: CIOs must be sensitive to customer behaviors and desires and build a dynamic ecosystem responsive to same. CIOs must be up-to-date with the latest industry trends and deploy creative solutions. One way to do this could be to set up a standalone start-up culture conducive to innovation.
3. Analytics: CIOs must drive analytics to help in risk assessment and pricing optimisation, as well as in developing marketing strategies and customer experience. CIOs must deploy analytics tools and intelligence to derive more meaning and insights from the data sets stuck in legacy systems.
4. Chief Talent Officer: To encourage digital transformation, CIOs must view themselves as Chief Talent Officer, IT evangelist, and/or Chief Inclusion Officer to drive talent acquisition, skilling, and cross collaboration within the organization.

CIOs should, per the report, focus on only a handful of high-impact initiatives at a time and develop a compelling story around what these could accomplish. By doing so, they can both see digital in a more tangible and concrete way themselves, as well as repeat the story to others.

To fully benefit from digital opportunity, CIOs must transition away from a “service oriented” role, to working alongside their fellow C-suiters, in a partnership position.

It has become nothing short of a digital CIO imperative to plug and play in industry ecosystems — even ones that extend beyond insurance — to enable more contextual and relevant services.

Lastly, CIOs should keep current with consumer use of technology so they can anticipate what the “ask” is behind a user request and think innovatively about the response and potential solution.

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