FINEOS Executive Breakfast Briefing Series for Insurance Companies

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How to Optimise Business Value from IT: Strategy, Innovation, Value Realisation
with Professor Joe Peppard

Overview

Insurance companies are being forced to lean into the stiff breeze of the global financial crisis and are battling hard against reduced investment returns and pressure on overall premium income. They are also facing an increase in claims volumes and a challenging time in managing their expense ratios. As such, the dominant issue for most is how they can grow the business while at the same time keep costs under control. This has put a focus on technology and particularly how it can be used to improve flexibility, distribution and efficiency. Despite the current economic downturn insurance companies will continue to invest in major IT projects to achieve these goals, although experience tells us that not all of them will succeed. For some, they simply make the wrong investments. For others, the spend fails to convert into real business value. In these challenging times, failure could prove very expensive indeed and so realising the business benefits that these IT projects initially promised has become imperative. To help insurers overcome this challenge, FINEOS is delighted to host a series of executive breakfast briefings looking at how to optimise the business value from IT.

Executive Briefing:      How to Innovate through Information Technology
Date:                            Friday 22 January
Time:                            08:00 – 09:00am         

Despite the potential of IT, innovating through information technology remains a challenge for most organisations. While there are a multitude of examples of IT being deployed by companies to provide them with a superior competitive position, in the majority of cases these are one-off instances with organisations unable to sustain this innovative capability. Many innovative deployments of IT are the result of luck rather than through any formal innovation process. This briefing will present research findings examining good practice. Questions being explored include: How do you marry emerging IT capability with business opportunities? How similar to, or different from, conventional forms of innovation is IT innovation (i.e. from traditional R&D processes)? Is it a top-down or bottom-up process? What are the road blocks to the implementation of this process? How is an environment that is conducive to IT innovation cultivated? Are there particular mechanisms, routines and incentives that can be put in place to support the innovation process, for example processes, metrics or targets? 

Executive Briefing:      Integrating IT into Overall Corporate Strategy: What is the Role of the
Executive Briefing:      Business Executive?
Date:                            Friday 26 February
Time:                            08:00 – 09:00am         

IT investments must happen in line with corporate strategy if they are to deliver the benefits required and push the business forward as a whole. As such, it needs to be a central consideration in commercial decisions at the highest level. This briefing will look at the pitfalls of taking IT decisions independently from the rest of the business, discuss how IT can be brought into the fold and highlight the huge number of areas in which such an approach will make a significant positive impact. In particular, it will highlight the key role of business executives.