How Insurance Industry CIOs Tackle Peak JFM Quarter

January, February and March (JFM Quarter) are busy months for the Insurance Industry, as this is the quarter that marks the end of the financial year. The JFM Quarter contributes to 40 percent of the annual business of the insurance industry. It is evident that the increase in business would need the help of technology and this would also throw up a host of IT challenges for the organisation too.

Business demands of stakeholders

The spurt of business growth in the JFM Quarter poses a challenge for all business stakeholders. It is imperative for business stakeholders like operations, finance and marketing and sales to put forward their requirements before the IT department in order to deliver as per the business requirements.

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The business challenges include coping up with the business volume with a process perspective, followed by the resource availability for that need and the turnaround time for the issuance of the policies.

Information systems play a major role in handling the business growth given the fact that they are scaled up to the level of the expected growth. Connectivity is also a major advantage that IT offers to the business. With IT, branches can stay connected to collaborate for service enhancement. However, the insurance season also strains the IT architecture of an enterprise. |

IT challenges as a result of increasing business demands

Considering the fact that the number of insurance policies sold in the first quarter will be comparatively higher than the other nine months, while also taking into account the approaching closure of the financial year, the IT systems are put under pressure with loads of information being posted and processed.

A major challenge that companies face is the problem of being unable to make any additional purchases because they would be of no use in the next financial year, once the business eases. One of the most critical challenges is system availability. “The system has to be available for 18 to 20 hours,” says Dipak Sahoo, VP – IT, Bharti AXA Life. System scalability also plays a major role in catching up with the business demand. The system that has not been tested for the maximum business volume will probably crash when the threshold volume is surpassed, resulting in total chaos.

The business should also assure network connectivity so that the branches can login and continue doing business. The IT department needs to identify the timing of the network usage. “We need to find out what is the peak period and the activities that can be pushed to a non peak period,” said Dhiresh Rustogi, Executive VP – IT, Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance. Resource availability to handle the extra pressure and demand is also important.

Application support is another area that needs to be dealt with. When there are too many systems to handle, interoperability gains importance. The application support needs to assure that the data reconciliation and the system health check reports need to be in place. Vendor support also becomes critical.

The way out

There are some important areas that need to be addressed before planning for the business growth period. At the outset it is critical to discuss the requirements with all the stakeholders of the business. The more fluid the communication channel between the departments, the more accurate the projections will be. In addition to this it is also important to invite suggestions and ideas from the stakeholders for them. The other critical activity that not only holds true for the business season but throughout the year is the various checks that are conducted on the system.

As far as the physical systems are concerned, the architecture should be kept intact since there are many inherent linkages. There should be a plan in place to manage the eventuality of a system breakdown. The existence of a DR site is also critical to assure for a fallback mechanism in case of a disaster.

Going forward, channelising the bandwidth traffic for making the systems available at all times is also important to avert any network downtime. This can be done by identifying the right bandwidth for mail traffic, application traffic etc. The server has to be scaled up as well.

Scheduling of the business activities also enable to make the most of the bandwidth. “We realised that the time line between 5.30 pm to 7.30 pm in the evening was used both by the new sales team and for banking as well,” said Rustogi and it was finally decided to reschedule the banking activity."