Prashant Nema is EVP and CIO of Arch Capital Group. Prior to joining Arch, he served as CIO and CTO at Silicon Valley Bank and held product engineering roles at Oracle, BP, and Xoriant. He
What are your top priorities for the next six to 12 months?
One is to improve and mature our IT organization’s ability to deliver and operate with agility, i.e., Agile transformation. This initiative has been underway for a couple of years already, but there are planned opportunities to work with IT staff and business stakeholders to move up the Agile IT maturity model to improve business value and productivity.
The second is continuing our overall digital transformation—not only providing new channels and new possibilities for products and interacting with customers digitally, but also improving the utilization of data and automation within the company. And the third priority is continually improving everyday operations: How do you preserve and defend operations and make them more predictable, more transparent, and safer?
What has been the biggest impact of the pandemic environment on your way of working?
We have all settled into a pandemic operating model and are managing effectively. I think communications are more challenging than we’d like to admit. Although everybody has done an awesome job over video conferences and audio conferences, the value of in-person communications—and a team physically huddling together in a conference room or looking over a cubicle and chatting to a colleague—is really hard to replicate virtually. The more you try to do that when you’re remote, the more you’re busy on one call or another, and then there’s the risk of “Zoom fatigue” and burnout. So that’s an issue that I think everyone is facing. I don’t think we’ve found a silver bullet yet, but I’m confident as we evolve to the new normal new options will emerge in the form of hybrid operating models.
How has the relationship between IT and other business units evolved over the past year as you’ve made your Agile investments and people are working primarily remotely?
One positive outcome is that the business folks were extremely thankful to the IT teams in the last year when everybody had to be home, because the IT teams were able to keep everybody going, get everybody home, and give them the connectivity so they could all do their work. Both business and IT teams have settled into working together, like before in the Agile models, and the business overall is very appreciative that technology has continued to enable them to keep doing their jobs on an ongoing basis.
What do you see as some of the biggest challenges ahead when you think about the role of technology and some of the opportunities to use technology to improve the business?
I think the challenges are going to be twofold. One is that people are now used to the idea that you can get things quicker and that we can do things digitally—the demand for the digital transformation is here to stay and will only grow. Businesses are asking for more digital transformation, and they want things within weeks or months not quarters or years. So, how does IT stay on top of this consistent demand for digital and agility? Keeping up with that demand, that’s one challenge.
And the second thing is staying focused on the customer perspective, making sure we don’t start creating solutions without a compelling customer value. It’s a hardening market, so everyone is bullish, and everyone wants everything right away. But if you haven’t understood what the real customer need is, you may not be able to prioritize effectively.
Which emerging technologies are you most interested in and thinking about?
The most important thing on the top of my mind is data-related technologies that enable us to most effectively leverage quality data. I don’t think the insurance industry is really where it needs to be yet when it comes to data, so you’re going to see a lot of industry investment in this area in the next couple of years.
The data space is very broad: from data sourcing (including third-party) to collection (structured and unstructured) to aggregation (marts, stores, warehouses) to analytics (decisions, predictive), all supported by AI and machine learning for integrity and agility.
How have you and your team leveraged the Novarica relationship?
We talk to Novarica frequently to get a sense of where the industry is going and what our peer group is doing, especially around leveraging different technologies. We also reach out to validate our assumptions and plans to make sure we’re considering all the relevant options. And finally, we use the benchmarking data to understand where we stand vs. the industry on investments. Our team has built a good relationship with the Novarica team, and we know we can reach out any time for a useful perspective and advice.
