Diaxion use DevOps, Operational Excellence and Continuous Delivery programs to complete an IT transformation for a large Insurance Company
Overview
Our client is one of the largest private mortgage
insurers, serving lenders throughout the world including
Australia, the United States, and Puerto Rico.
They help families to achieve home ownership sooner by making affordable low-down-payment mortgages a reality.
The Challenge
Our client was undertaking an IT transformation to enable the business strategy. This transformation needed to break the legacy operating model that was tied to decades of processes and controls.
The current model saw resilience and code quality issues in production, operational service management stagnation, and was unable to keep pace with an always on, rapidly changing modern digital world.
Our client was encountering market share challenges from new digital only entrants who offered products much quicker with more flexibility. Unsure how to best start and then focus the IT transformation journey, Diaxion was engaged to discover, analyse the current state, and identify an overarching transformation program to meet the defined target state.
The Solution
Diaxion approached this engagement with a business enablement and benefits perspective, working from a cradle (request) to grave (request completion and service termination) experience model. Through the running of various workshops Diaxion sought to understand what the business transformation needed from an IT perspective and looked to optimise that service and its process to ensure that it was available as quickly, automatically and predictably as possible. Critically, the service needed to provide all offerings in a consumable context to the requestor so that no further request or human action was required prior to the requestor being able to utilise it. For each business value chain associated with the key problem areas Diaxion analysed the value chain for optimisation, identifying typical handoffs, failures, system integrations and process controls along the business value chain that could be optimised across the design, build and run aspects of the business service. From there a set of business goals were defined for the program to achieve as business benefits. Three programs were identified:
- DevOps- identify the maturity level of DevOps desired to be achieved, utilising infrastructure as code and orchestration to provide consistent infrastructure delivery, operations and security compliance in a rapid automated fashion
- Operational Excellence – release, change process optimisation and rapid code deployment, along with improved operational reporting and ITSM practices
- Continuous Delivery – enabling the development and quality assurance team to work utilising continuous testing, broader testing types within Agile teams with development pipeline improvements, and smaller more agile development and release cycles
The Outcome
The foundation outcomes have been achieved to enable the first generation of the transformation. Next steps on the journey have been defined and agreed, with the client continuing their own utilising the core team that Diaxion had worked with to champion and lead the transformation journey.
The foundation technology and concepts have been completed; an ongoing journey focused more on the People and Process transformation across the IT operation is now under way.
