The Hartford's P&C Division Enters Execution Stage of Transformational Effort
Speaking the Business' Language
The change has been most apparent, and perhaps most critical, to the IT team's business customers. "They've noticed the most difference," Plotkin says. "We now articulate things from a business standpoint. We can keep the IT-speak one level below and so we've become much more valuable to [the business]."
That newfound value has manifested itself in many ways, but in few areas has it been more apparent than the carrier's foray into direct marketing, particularly in personal lines. Departing from the carrier's traditional agency-centric model presented two key challenges, Plotkin relates. New products needed to be developed to meet the needs of new consumers, and a new front-end platform was needed to reach them, he says.
"Our primary channels today are phone and mail," Plotkin continues. "So to develop out an Internet channel takes a lot of both IT capability as well as business process change."
To address those challenges, IT and the business partnered to define the new platform and develop a cost-benefit analysis, according to Plotkin. Then, while he and the business continued to turn that definition into business requirements, The Hartford's architecture team began building out a Web platform, with e-signature, data analysis and security capabilities. Meanwhile, Patel's ADM team focused on developing an Internet software delivery factory.
"So you really have three entities -- CIO and the business, architecture, and ADM -- all moving toward a common goal, which is getting into the direct marketing space fast," Plotkin outlines. "We're running in parallel, whereas prior to this [transformation] we would have done a lot of this serially."
Coming Together Across the Enterprise
Clearly, enhanced internal partnership has been a critical piece of the P&C division's IT transformation. But the group also has started reaching out across the enterprise to partner more closely with the carrier's life division.
Plotkin points out that The Hartford's overall business is relatively balanced between P&C and life. "We have a fairly equal distribution between our life business -- primarily driven by annuities, 401(k)s and other retirement vessels -- and our property casualty business," he says.
For a variety of reasons, such as the different regulatory requirements for each group, The Hartford's life and P&C divisions had operated as separate entities for a very long time, Plotkin notes. Recently, though, the groups have come together. According to Plotkin, physical infrastructure has been centralized under The Hartford's corporate umbrella, and -- as the company has started to consider application architecture and IT in more general terms -- an IT operating committee that includes senior IT leadership from the life, P&C and corporate entities has been established.
"We've actually made some good progress in coming up with standards, reusability and one common way to do that," Plotkin says. The cooperation has given The Hartford better leverage with its vendor partners and, in certain instances, the company has been able to reduce the number of vendors in its profile, he adds.
The IT operating committee also has driven the outsourcing of The Hartford's data center structure to IBM (Armonk, N.Y.). "We've done a lot of data resiliency work, including the consolidation of data centers down from seven to two," Plotkin comments.
Kim is careful to point out, however, that The Hartford is not centralizing IT for centralization's sake, but only when clear business drivers, such as reuse, support it. The P&C division, for instance, has the innovation lab, which was launched three years ago. It's likely that the life division could begin to leverage the lab in the future, rather than develop its own from scratch, Kim suggests. (For more on the innovation lab, see related sidebar, previous page.)
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