Business and technology must achieve harmony in an organization, according to CUNA Mutual's Rick Roy, senior vie president, Customer Operations and Chief Information Officer Tom Gosnell, who addressed an audience of more than 100 senior insurance executives and chief information officers from across the country here for the Insurance & Technology's 8th Annual Executive Summit.
The summit brings together senior-level insurance executives interested in pursuing innovation, how to manage the risks of innovation, and how to successfully reap the returns and rewards.
The executives discussed how business and technology came together to drive CUNA Mutual's current three-year transformation effort to meet the increasing demands of credit unions.
"As we developed our transformation strategy, it became abundantly clear we needed to increase innovation, speed, and business value to improve the customer experience and sustain our competitive advantage," Roy offered.
That led to new expectations on how business and technology work together to drive innovation.
It's not just about deploying new technologies, but advancing to the next generation of business/IT collaboration.
Innovation requires rethinking how companies are structured, the jobs people do, and how performance is evaluated, they stressed.
"The insurance industry continues to rapidly change as the competitive landscape grows with new entrants," Roy said. "Talking with our industry peers about how organizations can innovate themselves through organizational structures is a valuable experience for us. Many insurance companies are evaluating what they need to do to succeed in this new market environment."
"From a technology perspective, we really challenged the way we had been doing things and developed new roles and responsibilities for the chief information officer and senior IT executives," Gosnell said. "We determined IT could increase business value by being better integrated into our overall strategy and business plan."
IT played a key role in the planning of CUNA Mutual's new Customer Operations Center in Fort Worth, Texas.
"As we developed our plans for the Customer Ops Center, we relied heavily on IT to make 'siloed' (small business) processes more consolidated and streamlined," Roy said.
"The value of technology and processes is in the sustainability. Essentially, we're trying to better leverage technology to make and sustain the organizational structure and drive change. That means using it as an enabler that will optimize processes, improve how people do their jobs and ensure consistency in how we serve our customers, regardless of whom they talk to. That results in the delivery of a consistent, competitive customer experience," Gosnell said.
CUNA Mutual is using this model to better serve credit unions, added Roy.
