Teams and practices for effective digitization at Gjensidige Insurance, Norway
We sat down to speak with Christian Rorholt Moe, Chief Digital Officer at Gjensidige Insurance, a leading Nordic insurance company with 4000 employees and business in the Nordic and Baltic countries, to understand their approaches to teams and practices for effective digitization.
Christian Moe, CDO at Gjensidige Insurance
In his daily job, Christian strives to enable his team of 120+ tech & design people to deliver software and digital services that result in great customer experiences. Christian is responsible both for the software development teams that deliver Gjensidige’s digital customer journeys and the company's enabling software products and IT infrastructure platforms. Prior to joining Gjensidige six years ago, Christian held various roles within management consulting, data science, enterprise software development and as a developer in his own start-up.
Q1: How is digitization affecting the insurance industry?
I believe that digitization is a key force that will continue to shape the insurance industry in the years to come. From a global perspective, the industry’s previously lukewarm adoption of digital technologies means insurers must play catch up, learning how to apply more data and advanced analytics tools to underwriting and price matching, distribute digitally and automate customer journeys and back-end processes. To do so effectively, they must be able attract and retain talent with the know-how to incorporate digital tools into insurance activities. I believe that no facet of the global insurance industry will be left unchanged by digitization.
Lucky for us, the Nordic insurance market is way more digital and efficient than what we see in other parts of the world. Over the last decade, Gjensidige has continuously adapted business strategies and our operating model to retain our position as one of the industry leaders in a more digital world. I believe that our results show that Gjensidige is one step ahead of competition in many areas – but we need to stay on our toes to sustain and strengthen our position.
Q2: In what areas have you invested in digitization and what are some of the results so far?
Over the last years, we have invested holistically in digitization and technology. First and foremost, we have accelerated digitization and automation of our core business processes: Product development, pricing, sales, customer service and claims handling. In parallel with this, we are building a modernized technology platform. This includes replacing legacy systems, building a top-notch design system, automation of CI/CD pipelines, and moving nearly all our applications to public cloud. Our way of working with software development is shifting clearly towards a DevOps-based model. Last, but not least, we have recently hired 50+ people and we are continuously up- and re-skilling our organization.
This has resulted in substantial business benefits. At the time of this interview, examples of key commercial achievements include:
40% annual growth in digital sales over the last 5 years
More than 100% growth in digital customer service, shifting transactions from call centers to online
Claims handling is heavily digitized – more than 80% of claims are now filed online, of which up to 40% of are automatically handled.
Again, this would not have been possible without the right people on board – a prime focus for us is hence to continue to build a strong technology organization.
Q3: How do the organization of software teams in Gjensidige map to the concepts and patterns in the Team Topologies book?
Changing how we do and organize software development has been a key priority for us since we started our digital efforts. Back in 2015, all work was project-based and to a large extent based on waterfall principles. This had to change. Therefore, our Digital Division established an organizational structure and governance model that better reflected the need to have lower processing times, faster feedback loops and continuous development and experimentation. Of course, changing our way of working is not something that is done overnight. I believe, however, that our experiences and results from the last few years show that we are on the right track. Our current team structure aligns well with the archetypes of teams presented in Team Topologies.
Broadly speaking, Gjensidige now has the following team structures in software development:
Our product teams align with the stream-aligned team archetype. These are multi-disciplinary teams that operate our core business processes: pricing, digital sales, digital customer service and digital claims handling. They take end-to-end responsibility for a specific business and software domain. The teams should deliver on KPIs and goals within four main areas (illustrated in the figure below):
KPIs on business outcomes that are directly aligned to the business domain. As an example, the digital sales team is measured on sales, conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
KPIs on development speed measured in terms of lead times and deployment frequency.
KPIs on quality in Operations, typically measured in terms of change success rate and mean time to resolve incidents.
KPIs on Security, which typically could be measured in terms of the number of security incidents or the risk levels associated with known vulnerabilities in software libraries and code.
Responsibilities of stream-aligned teams at Gjensidige
Gjensidige also has several platform teams whose job is to provide compelling internal software products to accelerate delivery by the stream-aligned teams – hence enable them to achieve better results – in terms of business outcomes, development speed, quality and security. Examples of enabling platforms include:
Design Platform - a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build any number of front-end applications.
Analytics Platform – tools and services for tag management, data collection and machine learning models for personalization.
Web Application Platform - to support development and building of highly specialised and optimised digital experiences—complex websites, progressive web apps, and web-based APIs
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform – offering access to customer data and marketing campaigns
DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure platform – offering the tooling and infrastructure other teams need to build high-quality software in a fast and reliable manner.
Our aim is that the platform teams should view the stream-aligned teams as their customers and develop their platforms based on their needs. From an architectural perspective, our ambition is of course to have a loosely coupled architecture, and hence aim towards a set of “thinnest viable platforms” that allow the stream aligned teams to operate freely. We are on the right path to this, but this is of course a long and demanding endeavor.
Further, our core system team operates Gjensidiges mainframe core system. The mainframe core system contains all customer data and the majority of the business logic need to do e.g. pricing, claims handling and policy management. This very important team of course aligns well with the Complicated Subsystem team archetype.
Finally, we have our enabling teams, such as Architecture and Information Security. They collaborate with other teams to help them gain the capabilities that they are missing or do not need constant access to. As an example, we have an ongoing initiative with our infosec team to ensure that they are involved as early as possible in the software delivery process and help our teams build infosec capabilities so we can “shift left” our security work.
Q4: What are some of the key challenges Gjensidige have had to deal with so far to ensure successful implementation of the above structure?
It is a fact that customer expectations continue to relentlessly rise as new technological opportunities emerge. The product owners in our stream-aligned teams expect us to have the capabilities to deliver application features wherever and whenever needed. And they are right to expect this – sustained business success is indeed dependent on our ability to quickly respond to customer requirements and market opportunities. As previously mentioned, this called for a shift towards a DevOps-based delivery model - with corresponding hurdles to overcome. I’ll name a few of them.
First, from a technology standpoint we need to ensure that we can deliver digital services with high speed and high quality in a sustainable manner. Feature delivery must be done in a way that enables high software delivery performance over time. This is of course the classical trade-off that all tech organizations must handle – spending time developing new functionality and spending time building underlying technical capabilities. Striking the right balance can sometimes be hard. Our experience, however, is that this challenge can be resolved when our teams keep an open and transparent dialogue with the business side on the trade-offs that need to be done, and that each team maintains one backlog that contains both functional and technical work.
The second challenge has been – and is - around nurturing a culture and establish governance structures that allow teams to continuously improve flow, establish faster feedback loops and do continuous development and experimentation. We’ve come a long way compared to where we were just a few years ago – and it is still something that requires continuous focus and strong leadership.
Third and finally, we cannot get anything done without the right people. Finding and retaining technology and digital talent persists as a key challenge. Over the last years, Gjensidige has taken many steps to get in front of this challenge. To name a few examples, we offer all tech employees role-based training and certification paths in modern technologies such as public cloud, we are holding internal tech conferences and speaking at external ones, and we have established several internal technical communities. This has resulted in more engaged employees, which in turn helps us build a stronger employer brand and attract more of the tech talent we need.