What’s the big deal about big data? Big data is an enormously appealing subject these days. However, many companies miss the big picture when collecting it -- or drowning in it. There is an idea that the more data, the better. In fact, the focus should be on determining the right data to help improve the overall customer experience. Raining Big Data Big data is like the weather -- we’re talking about it, but we haven’t quite figured out how to do anything about it. Even fewer know how to leverage it. There are lots of questions but few answers. For example, who’s familiar with the 3Vs? But don’t be afraid to get wet. Data can be used to improve many things for many people – including your employees and customers. I say “can” because, before you do anything, you need to make sure you are using the right data -- and not just the random troves collected throughout the years. Mining the right data can lead you to the right customer problems, which can then be solved, creating a better customer experience. Background Checks Always define before measuring. What does great customer experience look like in your industry? Figure out what you need to do to wow customers and then compare that with the reality of your business as it stands now. I’ve utilized customer journey mapping, net promoter scores and voice of the customer metrics with great results. You can even provide customers incentives to help you out with input. Here’s a smart way to do that. Start by checking the leading survey on customer experience, the Forrester Customer Experience Index, to see where your organization lands. It might surprise you. Reliable Friends Are Powerful Friends Right data helps organizations do many things, including: • Anticipate what customers want before they ask for it • Identify customer pain points and resolve them • Create new business value • Improve customer service interactions • Develop more effective marketing and better products • Improve operational efficiencies Take Southwest Airlines. It's using speech analytics to extract data-rich info from live-recorded interactions between customers and personnel to get a better understanding of customers. Or read about Avis Budget’s data-driven growth model. It uses big data to identify the most valuable customers today and tomorrow. How, you ask? By examining a broad range of data sources, including structured information like purchase histories, CRM data and intelligence from industry partners, as well as unstructured information like social media, blogs and videos. Sorting through the data has helped all customers be treated like VIPs. These are only two examples of forward-thinking leaders using the right data to create actionable insights that monetize their data. There are many more. What about your competitors? How far along are they down the big data road? And are they using the right data?

Avoiding the ever-growing early 20^th century fear of the growth of socialism in the U.S., fueled by author Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the federal government was eager to shift the passionate, muckraker sentiment for a Marxist-designed social insurance system (aka workers comp) to the states -- only federal and certain interstate commerce employees are covered by federal statutes. Workers' comp relinquished an employee’s right to sue an employer for tort negligence and provided, in return, medical benefits and a wage replacement benefit. Dubbed “the grand bargain,” in the early 1900s, this tradeoff scheme has resulted in an ever-changing seesaw struggle between employers and employees that has wide disparity from state to state. The uneven playing field of each state and the District of Columbia has resulted in a pendulum effect fueled by work comp reform measures and case law that tends to only widen disparities among states as special interests battle for changes in state laws. Meanwhile, the insidious growth of work comp fraud fuels the call for additional reform measures, and some feel they have gone too far. Yesterday, ProPublica published with NPR a major article making just that case. Some facts from the article: In the past 10 years, 33 states have passed workers' comp laws that restrict or reduce benefits or benefit eligibility. Severely injured workers are the most likely to experience diminished benefits, as states like Florida have cut such benefits by 65% or more during the past 20 years. In California, insurers are able to re-open old cases and deny medical care based upon physicians who have never seen the patient. The percentage of workers' comp premium or self-insured dollars destined for injured workers has gradually diminished to where the majority of costs go to medical providers, drug companies and attorneys. Keep in mind: Workers' comp was touted and designed as a no-fault, lawyerless system. Workers' comp administrative law judges in California used to called “referees.” In August, a Florida circuit judge ruled that the state’s workers' comp law is unconstitutional, saying that benefits had been “decimated” and that the law “fails miserably” as to health, safety, welfare and morals. If the ruling is upheld, it is quite possible that workers in Florida may be able to sue their employers to force the legislature to enact new workers' comp laws. These issues have drawn the attention of Sen. Bob Casey, D-PA, who introduced the Payroll Fraud Prevention Act, aimed at reducing employee workers' comp misclassifications ,and is now working to have Congress make laws for basic protections for injured workers. Adding more fuel to the fire, the states of Texas and Oklahoma have workers' comp "opt-out" provisions for employers, with Tennessee and other state pondering this option, as well. Is this abandonment of the 1911 workers' comp model a sign that disruption is a likely outcome for this century old system? The burning question is whether the U.S. workers' comp system should be rebuilt from scratch. Should Medicare and workers' comp be woven into a federal system of benefits that doesn’t distinguish between injured workers from one jurisdiction to another? Is federalization of workers' comp an inevitable outcome of these events? Join the conversation…

Gradually, over the last four-plus years, several management liability insurance (MLI) carriers have shifted their underwriting appetite and guidelines nationally, most dramatically in California. These changes have included some combination of: ·         Increased rates ·         Increased retentions ·         Reductions in coverage ·         Reductions in total limits offered ·         Reductions or removal of wage and hour defense cost sub-limits ·         Non-renewal of insureds based on industry, asset size, financial condition or loss experience. This is quite a change, as for the previous 10-plus years there has been a surplus of capacity and MLI carriers were eager to write accounts at very attractive rates and terms. While there are still numerous MLI carriers with significant capacity, including some new entrants, the marketplace appears to be reaching a point where this capacity will no longer be use to offer the terms and pricing that we had been accustomed to seeing. This raises the question, “Why?” Based on our conversations with MLI carriers in this niche, here are a few of the reasons: ·         Poor economic conditions five to seven years, ago leading to a significant spike in the frequency of employment practices liability (EPL) and directors and officers (D&O) related claims ·         Dramatically rising EPL claims expenses (even if a claim is without merit -- remember, these policies cover defense costs) ·         Significant and continual increase in the filing of wage and hour claims (wage and hour suits are up 4.7% in the last year and 437% in the last decade) ·         Uptick in D&O claims involving bankruptcy-related allegations, breach of contract, intellectual property, federal agency investigations and judgments, family claims  and restraint of trade ·         The duty-to-defend nature of the policies, forcing carriers to provide a wide expanse of defense coverage for what might be arguably uncovered claims or insureds What can our current (and new) non-profit and privately held management liability insureds expect as a result of the changes in the marketplace? Our recommendation is to set expectations as follows: ·         There will be increases in retentions and premiums. ·         Smaller clients will need to absorb bigger percentage increases in premium and retention (as well as possible reductions in coverages), although in many situations the incumbent carrier will still be the best option if the increases are not outrageous. ·         A reasonable degree of competition and capacity will still be available for the larger management liability client. This may help mitigate increases in premium and retention. ·         Increases will be felt by insureds located in major cities (carriers generally still like risks in smaller cities and outside of states such as California, Florida, Illinois, New York and New Jersey). ·         Coverage for the defense of wage and hour claims will be more difficult to obtain and, when available, likely more expensive to purchase and with possibly lower limits or higher retentions. ·         Non-renewals by some carriers, based primarily on class of business or location. Some of these classes of business include: o    Real estate o    Healthcare o    Restaurant/retail o    Social media o    Pharmaceuticals o    Tech/start-ups ·         Carriers are asking for much more underwriting information than they have previously, especially if the insured has challenging financials, the insured is seeking additional funding or the insured has a challenging loss history. Since 2010, Socius has been advising our clients that the MLI market appeared to be trending toward a hardening, following on the heels of numerous years of softness. As we get deeper into 2015, we continue to believe that this is the case.  The gradual transition that we initially described has, in fact, taken firm hold. We hesitate to pronounce the market as officially “hard” only because we hear rumblings that suggest that market conditions could very well deteriorate further, making what we consider hard today even harder. For the moment, the watchword to agents and brokers is: “Manage expectations!  Difficult news is coming, so let clients know early – and often.”

Bryan Adams of @PhCreative recently wrote a great piece on the insurance brand here. Dare I say it's an outsider's perspective on the insurance world, provocatively titled: "Imagine if Insurance Brands Started Marketing Like Red Bull." He really got me thinking, and I wanted to share my perspective: 1. This is a hugely exciting idea, with lots of disruption to come, but you could argue that what we're experiencing is evolution, in the same way that Pixar was an evolution to Disney -- Disney is still about. The insurance industry is changing, general insurance quicker than life or health (as general insurance is what most of us see or experience), but all will evolve over time. 2. The insurance industry is one of the oldest; you have to go back to Edward Lloyd in 1688 to see the wonderful tradition of the coffee shops of London and how it all began. In many ways, we are returning to this tradition and bias toward the customer. It's great to see, but many industries are doing or have done the same. Anyone want to talk about the rise or fall of bank branches? 3. We are steeped in tradition, and like many industries need to have the old guard making way over time to the new guard. We will always have the traditional guys, the new guys and the bleeding-edge guys. From life policy to telematics and so much more in the middle, it's an exciting space. Many new CxOs are from industries outside of insurance, bringing in new ideas tried and tested in other industries that resonate well. 4. We have some amazing brands in the UK and worldwide from Direct Line, Churchill (yes, the dog), Legal & General (the bowler hat), LV=, Zurich, Allianz, Geico (the lizard), Prudential (the man from the Pru) and so much more, each with its own catchy strap line, just like those guys who are never knowingly undersold -- and you know who I mean without even looking it up (for the UK guys, anyway). In fact, I think brands are one of the biggest investment areas over the last few years, and are paying off. We can engage and resonate better with a new breed of savvy consumers with a limited and reducing attention span (regardless of the product or service). 5. Our brand is key (to most folks who care). We are generally trusted, irrespective of the line of business; we are long-term rather than short-term. Can you name the brand if I said:.

• Every day matters
• Drive like a girl
• With you ever step of the way
• Redefining standards
• Where you mean more
• It’s about time.

These brands, to me, say core values, vision, purpose and belief. We are not a sugary soft drink; we are the guys who help when your house is flooded, when your kids have written off the car, who help you through a hospital visit, who keep you well in retirement. We don't want to be a sugary soft drink. And we are doing all of this without our customers really ever wanting to engage regularly with us -- if they do engage, you know something is changing or, worse, has gone wrong. Apparently we now look at our phone more than 200 times a day. Your insurer, you call perhaps once a year, at best. You could argue that this makes the brand experience even more important. As for goosebumps, you are right: The insurance industry doesn't sell goosebumps. In days gone by, the insurance provider was there after the event. More recently, insurance has been there with you. Because of technology and brand disruption, insurance will be there ahead of your need -- from the crashed car creating a claim, to the water leak in the office block that sensors detect, turning off the mains and notifying the insurer and loss adjuster. When it comes to insurance, I'll pay extra to know I'm safe and will avoid the goosebumps.

If you think that the analysis you use to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) in your business is adequate, beware. It is intended to provide a 360-degree view of your risks and opportunities but often fails to fill that requirement because of superficial applications and failure to look at risks from connected systems. If your risk and opportunity analysis techniques are lacking, you could be very unprepared for the next recession, disruptive technology or game-changing way of thinking that could soon affect you. Too often, the last domino that struck in the last crisis is the main focus of all future risk-mitigation efforts. The whole string of triggers and threatening signals that led up to that last publicized tipping point and bursting bubble are ignored. Here are the 10 most common shortcomings for SWOT analysis:

1. Underestimating the role that vertical and lateral cascading human factors can play and having fragile back-up plans
2. Absence of war gaming, stress testing and disruptive failure mode analysis testing of your leadership mindset, strategy, work culture, processes, products and services
3. Lack of focus on disruptive innovations; you respond to them but do not create them with proven innovation-on-demand techniques
4. Assumptions that cyber security and patents are safe, so they aren't stress tested with advanced cyber-circumvention and patent-busting techniques
5. "Taboo talk rules"; uncomfortable discussion topics are avoided or not identified with focused and anonymously solicited inputs from employees
6. Ignoring "Trojan horse" risks that are secretly lurking in the hearts and minds of your employees or piggy-backing on purchased technology, software, products or services
7. Lack of use of "gamification" techniques to address the most sensitive threats in a disciplined, humane, engaging and effective manner
8. Failure to include effective strategies to attract and retain key human talent
9. Failure to identify low-profile threats that create unstoppable cascading risks -- from leadership to culture to processes to bad performance to weak responses to critical situations
10. Lack of use of external perspectives to challenge group-think assumptions of perceived safety and robustness

Simple SWOT analysis and risk-management techniques will not offer the protection required to survive the next economic crisis or disruptive technology. KISS concepts (keep it simple, stupid) have lost their ability to identify and protect against complex cascading risks. The world is a fragile, hyper-connected and cascading system full of surprises that will punish casual optimists and reward those who hope for the best but seriously plan for worst-case scenarios. The World Economic Forum's 2014 World Risk Report describes the global risks that can quietly cascade across borders and affect organizations in unsuspecting and surprising ways from a variety of threatening and linked factors. The complex dynamics that exist between developed, developing and emerging world markets is further complicated by the fact that many organizations know very little about the cascading system dynamics within their own four walls. Classic methods that attempt to describe the risk and opportunity landscape for individuals and organizations have not kept pace with the rising complexity and interactions between highly networked workplaces, global economies and internal and external threats. We have now entered a new era where we need new ways to describe and understand the complex world we have created, which has outgrown the simple tools we like to describe it with.

As more and more customer insight leaders rise in influence within blue chip companies, it seems timely to consider this question: How can they use their insights to influence senior management? My last search on LinkedIn turned up nearly 50 customer insight directors (CIDs) in the UK (excluding research agencies, where this job title does not have the same seniority) and more than 700 of their American cousins, chief knowledge officers (CKOs), in the U.S. Whether or not you have risen to the seniority of being called a CID, you are, I hope, finding that your executives want to hear from you. So, when you get that call or regular appointment at the top table, what should you do? Here are four tips I learned through getting it wrong to start with: Find out what is on their agenda. To start with, don’t try to raise your own agenda topics, based on current work from the customer insight team. Instead, find out what is on their agenda. Bringing extra insight to one of their current dilemmas, a customer perspective that can be acted upon, will increase your influence. This is akin to Stephen Covey’s classic advice to focus on your circle of influence, not your circle of concern. Bring a regular customer update. Being the voice of the customer at the top table is almost a moral responsibility for any organization’s customer insight leader. However, it’s important to focus on where you can add value to what they know already. I found one approach was to take responsibility for the existing customer metric that they track (whether that be net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSat) or customer effort score (CES)) and then enhance that program to bring a more granular understanding, which enables follow-up actions and evidence of impact. For example, additional questions captured in line with your learning of top concerns from qualitative research, plus analytics about what happens when the experience is changed. If your data and controls are sufficient, you may even be able to evidence retention rate impact from customer experience improvements and, as a result, provide direct financial benefit. Bring a regular commercial update. While not as expected from customer insight teams, an update on the performance of our targeted leads, direct marketing, etc. helped changed the perception of customer insight to being a commercial team. This was further improved by taking responsibility for measuring marketing effectiveness (with a combination of econometrics and other methods) and by sharing commercial targets. Once the top team realize how much of top line performance and retention impact is actually driven by targeting and insight-led media mix, the demand for updates on these parts of balanced scorecard increases, as does the team’s reputation. Update jointly with marketing and operations. Most of the CEOs I have known over the years are looking to see the kind of behaviors from their leadership population that give them confidence in their leadership pipeline. One of these is the ability to take a cross-functional view, to not just be concerned with achieving your targets or the reputation of your function, but looking to the good of the whole organization. Updating jointly with marketing and operations and allowing them to take some of your glory is a way to demonstrate this. It focuses, rightly, on what you do with insight and shows your collaborative approach. I recommend taking this risk. I hope that helps. What have you found helps you have most impact at your top table and get those big business decisions to be increasingly led by customer insight?

Parenting in the modern world means worrying about how much time your child spends in front of a screen. Pediatricians may recommend only two hours of screen time a day, but kids actually spend as much as seven hours a day looking at TVs, computer monitors, video games, tablets, and cell phones. Study after study has linked those sedentary hours to the skyrocketing rate of childhood obesity in the U.S. I realize that it’s not realistic in today’s high tech world to restrict screen time to two hours, especially for teenagers. So here’s an alternative: How about harnessing some of that technology to make our children healthier? The need couldn’t be more dire. One in three children in America is overweight or obese, and obesity remains one of the biggest threats to the health of our children, both now and as they grow into adults. That’s why the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced that it will pledge $500 million over the next 10 years to expand efforts to ensure that all children in the U.S. -- no matter who they are or where they live -- can grow up at a healthy weight. Building on a $500 million commitment made in 2007, this brings our funding of this issue to $1 billion. To get the biggest impact for those dollars, we need to come up with fresh ideas, creative approaches, and new tools that will help us build a culture of health for our children, and their children. What better tool than the digital devices our children have already mastered? And adults can lead by example, because many of us have already embraced digital health tools. There are currently 17,000 mobile apps designed to improve our health; according to industry estimates, half of the world’s 500 million smartphone owners will have a health app on their device this year. Plus, some 70 million wearable fitness trackers were sold in 2014, and people are expected to buy another 160 million by 2016. Of course, having health apps and using them is not always the same thing. And getting kids to use digital technology and social media for health is yet another challenge. But it’s not that big of a leap from Snapchatting with friends, or searching YouTube and Vine, to sharing stats and photos about how many days you walked to school, vegetables you ate or miles you rode on your bike. Almost 95% of 12- to 17-year-olds in the U.S. have Internet access at home or school. Why not meet them in their online world? We already know it can work. Zamzee, a children’s online activity meter and motivational website designed by HopeLab, with feedback from actual kids (and funding from RWJF) is meant to get kids moving more. Research shows that Zamzee increased physical activity in kids by 59% on average over a six-month study period. There is a growing number of such digital health tools designed with kids in mind. The Weigh2Rock.com website, founded by a pediatrician, allows overweight teens, pre-teens and their parents to form support groups, share tips and track their personal fitness goals online. It also allows healthcare providers to follow the progress and interact with their patients online. Leapfrog’s Leapband, introduced in August, is a personal fitness tracker for children. Worn like a watch, it uses games to get kids moving and allows them to rack up points as they progress though the challenges. FoodnMe.com, a site that promotes healthy eating, has a fun SmashYourFood mobile app that lets kids smash or explode a variety of foods (virtually, of course) while learning about their fat, sugar, and salt content. Actually, this one is fun for adults, too I’d like to see a lot more of these digital health tools for children. My hope is that developers, parents, health professionals and coaches will start thinking more like kids. Or, better yet, ask some kids what technologies and apps would most entice them to embrace healthier choices. I’ll bet they’d come up with some pretty creative ideas. Let's start now. If you have some ideas about how to harness personal data, digital technologies and social media in ways that can help kids, and their families, get and stay healthy, please share in the comments. Because even $1 billion won't solve this problem without lots of help.

I was reading an article recently in an insurance technology magazine and was somewhat startled to see that an insurance executive said he was looking to customer house-holding (i.e., ability to pull together all of the insurer's customers living at the same address) to enable more sales. I agree that house-holding is important to increased sales (and better customer service, as well). I was startled because when I was at John Hancock in the mid-1980s we were challenged to come up with a house-holding solution. We wanted to be able to drive further sales, of course, but we also wanted to identify how many customers had more than one of our insurance products. I would have assumed that every insurance company did customer house-holding today (three decades later) just as every insurer is geo-coding every address in its core administration system, compensation system, financial system and other system records. (Well, I'm writing this on a Friday, so I allow myself to daydream a bit.) But the insurance executive's comment led to my thinking about... No Magic Bullet I have found through my decades of being in the insurance industry that insurers tend to expect technology vendors to deliver magic bullets. (For context, I am from the marketing/market research side of the insurance industry... not the technology side.) My clearest memory of this belief in magic bullets is from my time in the late 1990s at the META Group delving into customer relationship management (CRM). Salespeople told me that insurers considered "CRM" to be a dirty word. Insurers were upset that technology vendors over-promised and under-delivered about CRM's benefits. Putting aside that over-promising and under-delivering is what technology vendors do as a matter of course, I believe that a significant part of the blame concerning CRM rests with the insurers themselves. A Lot of Hard Work CRM requires a lot of hard work. This remains true whether it was the CRM solutions of decades ago or the current cloud instantiations. And I mean a lot of hard work by the insurers themselves. Insurers must hold themselves responsible for:

• the cleanliness of the data that flows into and is stored in their core administration systems, compensation systems and other operational systems. Not the technology vendors... the insurers.
• creating (and updating) authorization protocols for accessing, editing/changing and deleting customer data.
• identifying the "right" type of data to store and use in CRM systems. I'm thinking here of pictures, sound (phone calls) and video streams whether from customer- or insurer-initiated contact or insurers monitoring their customers' social media sites for information that can improve customer service, product development or target marketing. Insurers should also get customer opt-in to collect and use customers' social media data.

I could go on with the hard work involved with CRM, but there are many examples of other solutions that insurers should be using and that involve hard work: predictive analytics, big data, interactive visualization and geographic information systems (GIS), to name a few. My Point Is.... My point is that with every solution that technology vendors bring to insurers with their promises of "saving time," "reducing costs," "creating a competitive edge" or "improving customer experience," there is significant hard work involved ... that the insurers will have to accomplish themselves. There are no magic bullets ........................ Or am I off on a limb yet again? What do you think ... whether you are an insurer or a technology vendor supporting insurers? And how do you resolve these challenges?

Insurance modernization results in core business and administrative functions using commonly trusted sources of data to inform and enhance business decisions and reporting. The modernization journey will affect not just processes and technology, but also people and the organization. While modernization’s desired benefits may be clear – lower costs, greater efficiencies, better risk management, more effective use of resources and keener market insight – the path to realizing them is complex and needs effective management. The Case for Change Insurance modernization is much more than just leveraging leading-edge information technology. It is not only an operational effectiveness initiative or technology upgrade but also a transformational imperative that affects multiple corporate functions. Moreover, when properly executed, modernization delivers broad benefits, including improved management of financial and operational risk, as well as longer-term organizational viability. There is some concern that insurance modernization is expensive and disruptive and focuses on creating an idealized insurance organization. However, modernization is actually a transformational journey with sequenced milestones and measurable benefits that accrue over time. This incremental path to operational improvement requires systematic program management and sustained commitment. Accordingly, the roadmap for the journey should include a set of complementary initiatives that directly involve the risk, actuarial, finance and IT functions. This will enable an organization to adapt more easily to demographic, economic, social, regulatory and cultural changes. And, with an empowered program management office (PMO) leading the way, organizations are much more likely to realize their vision of the future. Characteristics of a Modernized Program Management Office (PMO) The insurance modernization agenda requires consensus across a much broader group of constituents than a singular initiative does and also requires a wide mobilization effort. Among the most pressing challenges is developing capabilities that enable cross-functional action and cooperative, multi-party decision-making. Modernizing also requires collaborative relationships between individuals and groups such as risk, actuarial, finance and IT that may not have had only limited interaction with each other in the past. In the journey toward a modernized organization, a PMO will play a key role in making the promise of insurance modernization a reality. It should not be an afterthought or considered just a “nice to have.” Because it plays such a large role in ensuring implementation, it is a vital part of any transformation. The modernized PMO function:

• Includes the “chief modernization officer,” a senior executive role that provides explicit leadership and governance over the selection and delivery of key priorities alongside C-level executives and members of the board’s risk committee.
• Is responsible for delivering on the vision by forecasting and mitigating roadblocks to success in a number of areas, including capacity and budget constraints.
• Owns data governance and drives the decision-making and consensus-building processes in the development of data and systems that provide commonly trusted sources of the truth to risk, actuarial and finance user groups.

Other traditional program management office responsibilities – such as stakeholder engagement to status reporting – remain important and may expand to drive delivery of other business critical initiatives. Decommissioning of systems, in particular, will be important to achieve modernization milestones. The Benefits Committing to the journey is the first step. The key subsequent challenge is maintaining alignment on how and when to manage the portfolio of projects along the modernization journey. Ensuring that the PMO has appropriate stature within the modernization initiative can help establish a firm foundation for realizing the following objectives:

• Defining program and project level benefits.
• Stakeholder empowerment to govern the decision-making process, engaging the right people at the right time to drive consensus.
• Translating insurance modernization goals into strategies and programs that deliver on the corporate vision and objectives.
• Creating the fact base that drives decision-making:
  • Getting reliable, comparable data from project execution teams to make assessments.
  • Integrating project data (timelines, resource needs, financials, strategic data) in a way that supports good program-level decisions and effective demand management.
• Understanding demand and managing projects in the best interests of the enterprise and protecting against risk to goals.
• Forecasting demand and effectively managing capacity, based on resource availability and skill and competency alignment.
• Understanding and estimating the true impact of resource, schedule or scope alternatives.
• Estimating and tracking project value and worth (including continuing benefits tracking).The PMO’s leadership and holistic management of the breadth of an organization’s insurance modernization initiatives entails striking a balance between today’s near-term requirements and tomorrow’s “must have” capabilities.

Critical Success Factors Ensuring that the PMO has the appropriate, high profile requires unilateral support by the organization’s senior executives. The following key success factors will enable the PMO to drive successful delivery of each critical milestone:

• Business executive buy-in, including C-level sponsorship and support from risk, actuarial, finance and technology leaders.
• Strong commitment from stakeholders to carefully follow the process, including compliance with governance processes, decision rights and accountabilities.
• Multi-year commitment, which entails organizational and leadership support of the vision and its financial requirements each year along the journey. This will require sound investments and tracking progress to targeted objectives.
• Agreed-upon and formal prioritization criteria, including making principles-based decisions and choosing scoring mechanisms that measure results against principles.
• Supporting toolset that enables project leaders to adequately forecast, diagnose and course-correct as needed along the journey.

In exchange for organizational support, the PMO leader must commit to soliciting feedback from stakeholders to continuously improve the process. Success will include remaining aligned to changes in the economic and business climate and adjusting decision criteria as appropriate. Next Steps To be successful, insurance modernization requires a holistic view. The first steps toward modernization include a comprehensive assessment of the current PMO’s charter, roles, capabilities and processes. The PMO may be the first area of investment to deliver on the opportunities in the broader modernization roadmap. Executive sponsors and leaders with significant stakes in modernization should contribute to determining the ideal executive-level candidate to lead the charge. This leader should not only possess knowledge, skills and abilities to fulfill upon day-to-day duties, but more importantly should possess the leadership qualities that embody the vision of modernization and the interpersonal network to drive consensus-building and change. From strategic decision-making to driving results, the modernization journey depends on the right leadership and governance to drive movement and performance among the “gears” and delivery on the vision.