Our IT director came in to help this international insurance provider in drastically reducing operating costs by identifying superfluous and complex systems and applications, and recommending a more streamlined approach.

Company Profile

This company, a major global insurer, operated across multiple countries and territories.

CEO’s Mission

The Director led an Application Rationalisation Project. The company’s acquisitions led to costly, complex applications globally. This caused duplicated functions, risks, and inefficiency.

The goal was to simplify the global landscape. This involved identifying decommissioning and investment priorities. The aim was to reduce costs and align with the business’s future goals and strategy.

What Our Director Did

Initial Review

The IT Director undertook a full review of all the systems and applications, and in doing so discovered ageing, disparate and duplicated applications between and within business units. These were discovered to be driving costs and complexity as well as hindering the delivery of the business strategy and plans.

Setting Targets

The Director identified issues like ageing applications and high costs. They collaborated with senior management to align priorities. This alignment considered business strategy and risk management. After discussions, the Director crafted a rationalisation strategy. This strategy supported the overall business goals and priorities.

Reducing Operating Costs With The Business

Reviewing the business strategy revealed the essential applications and those that could be consolidated or decommissioned. The Director collaborated with the board, stakeholders, and other key personnel to address pain points in the project and challenge the status quo to achieve the desired results. The Director then created a transformation roadmap to set out the timing and priorities for delivery of an optimised application landscape.

Action On Applications

After grasping the business operations and the leadership team’s goals, the Director formulated a proposal and plan to consolidate and de-risk the systems. He identified opportunities to merge functions into single applications and to use enterprise systems. This approach aimed to manage operating costs, enhance application functionality, and facilitate data sharing across teams and business functions.

The Results

Over the course of this project, the Director was able to identify opportunities to reduce the number of the company’s in-use applications by 25% through a number of de-commissioning initiatives. This identified real cost savings of over 15% of the application operational costs in the first year, as well as an improved ability to achieve required regulatory compliance thanks to simplifying the application platform. The main objective of reducing financial and operational risks across the organisation was achieved thanks to the new-look application environment.

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