Driving the Change in the Insurance Sector Date:   Sunday , December 08, 2013 Bharti AXA Life Insurance Company Ltd. is an enterprise with interests in financial services and retail, providing financial advice and insurance solutions to the large Indian customer base. Based in Mumbai, the joint venture company has a 74 percent stake from Bharti Enterprises and 26 percent stake of AXA Asia Life. In the era of technology relevance and evolving maturity of new technologies such as Smartphone, tablets, social media, analytics, high speed networks, cloud and so on, the world is shifting to a new paradigm and a never before prospect to transform businesses. These innovations are touching every aspect of technology, right from the way budgeting is done, to the way customers are identified and given services to redefining business processes and everything on the way. The accepted and fixed metrics of excellence will no longer be relevant for a long as businesses are in for an exhilarating ride. Bridging the Techno-Gap In the Insurance sector, there are certain interruptive gaps in terms of solutions available to manage sales structures, their compensation and performance. Though solutions exist, there are very few choices available IT and operations management from an insurance perspective as this is a relatively untapped area. While there is no dearth of vendors in this space, this area will increasingly see more traction as the industry continues to mature. Technology is bringing a massive change in life insurance corporations. Mobility, centralized rule engines, integration architectures, cloud, social & analytics. All are changing persistently the way insurance will be understood, sold, issued and serviced. Organizations today are focusing on integrating the entire value chain for customers and presenting a consistent user experience using some of these technologies. The benchmark for the industry is varying increasingly in the organizations such as e-commerce, consumer web, travel, and retail industries. With the advent of hand held consumer technologies like social and mobile, today possibly as compared to any other point in the evolutions of organizations, a user has better access to technology at home than at office. Most users, especially the young generation is at ease with technology and use sophisticated applications largely available to them over the consumer web. Keeping pace with the user expectations is one of the major defy in insurance sector with respect to technology. These user expectations translate to the type of experience they expect in enterprise environments as well. With concerns on security, challenges with maintaining consistent user environments where pace of application evolution is generally slow and on top of all, bridging the gap between expectations and reality has also become a challenge. Hosted desktop environments, desktop virtualization and the move towards Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in some sense will help to bridge this gap to some extent, but will also at the same time trigger the expectations among new age users even more in terms of experience. Synchronizing with Organization’s Strategic Thinking There is no IT Function in any organization that exists in a vacuum. IT does not exist to experiment with new technologies and burden users with the technology trend of the day. As it is seen these days IT in a user organization makes the business strategies happen and in some cases defines and drives business strategies e.g. Fedex, Net Banking, IRCTC or MakeMyTrip. Essentially, the question is how does IT understand, support and enable an enterprise. The challenge then is to be synchronized with the strategic thinking of the organization , IT heads need to contribute on Management Committees, be involved in drafting strategy, increase board interactions and most importantly, see themselves as equal stakeholders in an organization\'s growth. The tools at a CIO\'s disposal may be technology, but the goal always is to enable and drive organizational success whichever way it is defined.