Mercury Insurance CIO on evolving IT/business relationship amid COVID-19

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This is a skyline view of downtown Los Angeles, California, Wednesday, February 4, 2004. Photographer: Susan Goldman. Bloomberg News.

Abby Hosseini is the CIO of Mercury Insurance Group. For the past 12 years, Abby has been responsible for developing and executing Mercury’s technology strategy as CTO and CIO while formulating the long-range vision for technology at Mercury. Abby has broad industry experience, including transformational work with global organizations in insurance, capital markets, banking, high tech, and retail. He spoke to Novarica, which gave Digital Insurance permission to repost the interview here.

What are your top priorities for the next 6-12 months?
Our biggest priority remains our core platform modernization project, which includes migration to a digital and modern policy management, claims, and billing system. We are moving the last remaining major book of business to our modern core platform and rolling out some new products as well.

We are also focusing on enhancing our digital customer experience, agent experience, and employee experience. We’re organizing our people, funding models, and roadmaps around delighting stakeholders. For customers, we are focusing heavily on self-service and creating a low-friction experience. For agents, we’re focusing on providing visibility into customer activities, as well as enabling pre-f

What do you think has been the biggest impact of the pandemic environment on your technology strategy?
Perhaps the biggest impact has been the acceptance of the idea that employees can work from home productively using a robust communication and collaboration architecture that was in the making by our IT team for years. It took us just one week to move over 95% of our team members to work from home, and we took many additional steps to help employees create comfortable workspaces at home with equipment, furniture, and connectivity.

We have doubled down on our technology investment, and our leadership has reinforced the need to accelerate enhancements to our digital, mobile, and omni-channel experiences. The pandemic also reinforced and accelerated the need for agility, a greater focus on analytics, and democratizing data. The pandemic has also strengthened our leadership team, bringing us closer together, and this has resulted in a heightened focus on increasing the speed of our digital transformation.

How has the relationship between IT and other business units evolved over the past year?
We have traditionally enjoyed a great degree of alignment between business and IT. We have continued to collaborate and build solutions together virtually and continue to meet project release deadlines.

We have also realized that re-evaluating our vision, mission, objectives, and key results during the pandemic has helped us gain a renewed focus on our core mission to work as one team to create value for our stakeholders. Our new virtual environment has brought us together in ways we never could have imagined, and this has decentralized decision-making and sped up projects. I believe we work even better under this new model, because happy and healthy employees lead to happy customers.

IT agility is not enough, however, because you also have to be focused on your various stakeholders’ technology needs and roadmaps. This has helped us accelerate our migration to an Agile product management operating model supported by design thinking. We are creating a business technologist category of employees that seamlessly transcend IT and business areas and act as innovation catalysts.

What do you see as some of the biggest challenges ahead?
For us, the challenge remains the complete migration to a digital operating model where our technology is designed and delivered based on Agile and design thinking principles. In insurance, you win new business with price and you lose customers based on poor claims or customer service experiences. Our business is hybrid model, where we are committed to independent agents while also promoting a self-service, digital, and direct-to-customer experience. This is unusual in our business, and it means we must be more agile, more flexible, and more analytical about our stakeholder experiences. It is no longer enough to roll out products and complete projects. The challenge is to focus on multi-year roadmaps that are built for these stakeholders and delivered rapidly as the market and consumer expectations shift.

Which emerging technologies are you most interested in and excited about?
The promise of artificial intelligence, the emergence of new ways of leveraging third-party data, contextual analytics, and adoption of cloud computing have made new product delivery and customer/agent experience models possible. The pandemic has just accelerated what was in the making for decades, and now with a powerful computer in everyone’s pocket, that mobile device has become an integral part our daily lives. We see the convergence of mobile, IoT, algorithms, rules engines, machine vision, and process automation through low-code citizen development as some of the most promising ways to propel our business forward.

We are leveraging more third-party data and machine vision, and our teams are employing more automation and technology to help with photo-based estimating, straight-through processing, e-payments, and global workforce management. It has also had a positive impact on customer service as we transition to become an omni-channel support organization. We also finally can see the true promise of customer 360 only after migrating to a more modern and unified core insurance platform supported by systems of insight and systems of interaction.

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Digital Transformation Artificial intelligence Big data Coronavirus
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