BI and a different type of outsourcing

The current economic climate seems to be providing ammunition for both those who favour outsourcing elements of IT and those who abjure it. I’m not going to jump into the middle of these discussions today (though I am working on an article about the pros and cons of outsourcing BI which will appear here at some future point). Instead I want to talk about another type of outsourcing, one that ended up being a major success in a BI project that I recently led. The area I want to focus on is outsourcing analysis to the business.

The project was at an Insurance company and in these types of organisations one hub for business analysis is the actuarial department. These are the highly qualified and numerate people who often spend a lot of their time in simple number crunching with the aim of ensuring that underwriters have the data they need to review books of business and to take decisions about particular accounts. As with many such people, they have both the ability and desire to operate at a more strategic level. They are sometimes prevented from doing do by the burden of work.

As I have explained elsewhere, an explicit aim of this project was cultural transformation. We wanted to place reliance on credible, easy-to-use, pertinent information at the heart of all business decisions; to make it part of the corporate DNA. One approach to achieving this was making training programmes very business focussed. One exercise that the trainers (both actuarial and indeed me) took delegates through was estimating the future profitability of a book of business based on performance in previous years (using loss triangulation if you are interested). This is a standard piece of actuarial work, but the new BI system was so intuitive that underwriters could do this for themselves. Indeed they embraced doing so, realising that they could get a better and more frequently updated insight into their books of business in this way.

This meant two things. First the number-crunching workload of actuarial was reduced. Second when underwriters and actuarial engaged in discussions, for example around insurance estimates to be included in year-end results, the process was more of an informed dialogue than the previous, sometimes adversarial, approach. Actuarial time is freed-up to focus on more complex analysis, underwriters become more empowered to manage their own portfolios and the whole organisation moves up the value chain.

This is what I mean by the idea of outsourcing analysis to the business. In some ways it is the same phenomenon as companies outsourcing internal administrative tasks to customers via web applications. However, it is more powerful than this. Instead of simply transferring costs, knowledge and expertise is spread more widely and the whole organisation begins to talk about the business in a different and more consistent manner.

It’s nice to be able to report a success story for at least one type of outsourcing.
 

Posted in business, business intelligence, change management, cultural transformation, education, enterprise performance management, management information, technology Tagged: actuarial, bi, business intelligence, change management, cultural transformation, information technology, it business alignment, management information, outsourcing