November | 2015
If you have followed the analysts' reports and some of the recent news on the IT trends, I suppose the writing on the wall is very evident - that a turbulent time is ahead for the traditional Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vendors across industries including insurance.
While leading SI partners of SAP modules are struggling with lesser sales numbers, the Celent report on the Build Vs Buy debate version 2015 for insurance industry also indicates and validates that there is no growth expected for the insurance companies on choosing a COTS products to meet their requirements.
The reasons are many - from a highly modular approach taken by almost all matured insurers in modernizing a specific module/function instead of the whole system in a big bang approach to a firmed up belief of the insurance companies that their business model is unique which differentiates them from other carriers in the market and also a subtle fear that their best practices will be shared with other potential carriers in terms of new functions and features in the forthcoming version releases.
From our experience in the developed markets, we have seen that choosing an established COTS product to meet the legacy modernization requirement often comes as a last option in the list of possibilities for insurance carriers, while most of the carriers look for an external support in terms of development partners to augment their IT team in building a system component exactly suiting their requirements.
I know there have been ample, often never ending debates on the pros and cons of a COTS products implementations. Let me share my thoughts on the possible roadmap. In my opinion, on our part, we need to do the following:
Engage with the customer to identify the pain areas and jointly brainstorm on the ways of coming up to a solution that caters to the organization's growth objective. This may include one or all of the following:
Simultaneously on the part of the product vendors, the following initiatives are expected:
Last but not the least, let us keep in mind that any transformation journey is not complete without active and equal participation of each of the stakeholders in every phase and the more detailed the joint planning and risk analysis followed by mitigation plans are in the preparatory stages, the more will be the gain in the implementation phase in terms of cost, delivery timeline and related quicker ROI achievement.
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© 2021 Wipro Limited |
Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences