Disrupting the insurance industry with DevOps

One of the U.S.’s largest not-for-profit providers of health care and insurance is among a growing group of organizations offering apps that allow members to connect with their doctors and access personal health information on their mobile devices. With complex demands on the mobile app, with more than 100 million permutations of variables to manage, the organization was concerned about their ability to provide ongoing and reliable services to their mobile customer base at a pace that would keep up with changing technology and increasing consumer demands.

The solution was a smart, unified automation framework that cut the regression cycle from three weeks to one week. With a grid infrastructure that included more than 25 devices, a test suite handling more than 1,000 test cases was deployed, with 70 percent reusability. It allowed the organization to easily and quickly simulate and manage test environments to bring higher quality apps to the market faster and at a lower cost.

This provider was exploring new, DevOps-powered methods that took a holistic approach to software development and IT updates by promoting collaboration, allowing the organization to focus its efforts on business efficiency and speedy product development.

As a whole, the insurance industry, whether an organization is offering life, pension, commercial or risk services, has a reputation as a legacy field: Traditional, cautious and thorough. At times, insurers have struggled to reconcile their work with the needs of today’s quickly moving world. Many of the larger, heavier organizations remain intimidated by the prospect of implementing large-scale changes.

Hesitancy can be a mistake because the external environment continues to change. As expectations for service and attention are increasing, insurers have learned that a focus on the customer now matters more than any other strategic imperative. Other resources available to the general public are further disrupting the traditional model for insurers, regardless of focus or geography. These threats come in the form of sharing economy models, value and price comparison shopping websites, new channels of communication and other digitally-enabled aspects of daily life. At an operational level, insurance companies also face changing models of cyber risk and ever-growing specificity in regulations and standardization.

The DevOps solution

These days, time to market is directly related to success. How can an industry that is by its very nature a cautious one keep up? A DevOps model helps insurers conceive, develop and deploy technology rapidly by enabling successful IT transformation across complex architectures. Establishing standardized infrastructure environments supports the timely change. New data and analytics and software automation capabilities are therefore producing better customer experiences and more efficient operations. Examples of other agile, forward-facing initiative from insurers include:

• Growing adoption of the cloud to improve agility and responsiveness
• Built-in compliance validation, with automated alerts when the system encounters variations from requirements
• Improving and automating call center management through data optimization
• Evaluating risk, assessing claims and weeding out fraud with data-powered analytics
• Drone deployment to assess claim damage

By ensuring agility and continuous improvement, organizations are setting themselves up for long-term success. Embracing new technologies and innovative business models increases the flow of development and deployment while maintaining quality, reliability and security for customers. That means a better experience for the end-user, for long-term success.

Learn more about our capabilities in Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance.