Emtech Group Podcast

00:00:17 Gary Tyreman
Hey, Kevin, how are you? It’s good to see you. Or well talk to.
00:00:21 Kevin Kelly
Hey, Gary, how you how you doing? It’s good to be back with you guys.
00:00:24 Gary Tyreman
I’m doing well. I’m doing well. Counting down the days until the dog days of summer are over. But you know, looking forward to the to the fall. Always love that time of year.
00:00:35 Kevin Kelly
Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s August here in Texas and the fall can’t get here quick enough for us.
00:00:43 Gary Tyreman
I understand that I’ve. I’ve been there. I’ve been there. I I know what you’re talking about. So.
00:00:49 Gary Tyreman
For the sake of the audience, you know, Kevin being fantastic. If you could introduce yourself.
00:00:53 Kevin Kelly
Yeah, yeah, I’m happy to, Gary. It’s, it’s, it’s good to be here. I’m Kevin Kelly. I’ve run a service and delivery from Mantissa group. We are a consulting firm in the life and annuity space, mainly in financial services. Part of that I spent about 17 years in New York life.
00:01:14 Kevin Kelly
11 years of that and a CIO role.
00:01:17 Kevin Kelly
For one of their businesses. So I’m familiar with the insurance ecosystem, the background there, how insurance companies work, the role of quality within them, and I’ve I’ve been on all sides of the spectrum. I’ve been on the carrier side. I’ve been on the vendor provider side and excited to have a conversation.
00:01:37 Kevin Kelly
Here.
00:01:38 Gary Tyreman
That’s fantastic. Wow. New York life. 17 years. And you said 11 of that was see.
00:01:44 Gary Tyreman
Yeah, yeah.
00:01:44 Kevin Kelly
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As that individual Co chair for one of their lines of.
00:01:50 Kevin Kelly
Business for quite a while.
00:01:51 Gary Tyreman
That’s fantastic. So, so here, here’s a question. I didn’t even write this down before, but what was the day in in the life of a CIO at a very large insurance carrier? What was that like? Did they ever blend or were they so distinct?
00:02:09 Kevin Kelly
Yeah.
00:02:12 Kevin Kelly
You know it.
00:02:13 Kevin Kelly
It was interesting, right? Because there’s always there’s overarching strategy stuff that that kind of lends over time and then but every day is a different day. There are different tactical issues going on. You know, some sometimes they’re operational challenges sometimes.
00:02:32 Kevin Kelly
It’s project challenges. Sometimes you know you working on a strategic issue with the.
00:02:39 Kevin Kelly
You know, most of my focus was actually on the business, not on the IT side, you know. So I was, I was responsible for technology and IT is the CIO, but I spent most of my time actually outward facing with my peers on the business side of it and.
00:02:40
No.
00:02:59 Kevin Kelly
So it was. It was a lot of that, you know, but you can never get away from the operations of the firm. So you know, it’s a lot of, it’s a big juggling act and a lot of lot of lot of ways every.
00:03:12 Gary Tyreman
Day. Yeah, that’s I. I think opens.
00:03:17 Gary Tyreman
Kind of a couple areas I’d like to explore because.
00:03:20 Gary Tyreman
You know, I believe a lot of people would assume a CIO is focused on the IT.
00:03:28 Gary Tyreman
And I’m not surprised personally that you were managing up and around and across less so in your organization, which means you.
00:03:39 Gary Tyreman
You had your good, your colonels and lieutenants to take care of the day-to-day, but you had to manage up and around, and I’m assuming that’s because when things go bad or wrong, they go bad quickly. And so maintaining building relationships would be absolutely critical.
00:03:56 Kevin Kelly
Yeah, absolutely. And.
00:03:59 Kevin Kelly
Yeah, I was fortunate. I had a had a good leadership team, a good set of lieutenants underneath me that could do with the day-to-day of the technology pieces and I focused my energy with my peers both within my division as well as the broader enterprise.
00:04:14 Kevin Kelly
There’s at large, you know, cause the insurance company. You have IT because you need to have IT. And if you do it right, it’s a strategic enabler and QA and quality in general can be a strategic enabler as well. But fundamentally, you’re trying to run a business, you’re trying to run an insurance carrier.
00:04:36 Kevin Kelly
So you know, a lot of time focused on distribution, sales, marketing, operations, operational excellence, that, that type of stuff. What problems is are the business.
00:04:48 Kevin Kelly
Facing and how can we identify solutions and deploy technology to help them help them address those challenges? That’s the fundamental role of the CIO and I think as far as in tech is concerned in the in the broader quality issue, you know that that’s where quality can come into play.
00:05:10 Kevin Kelly
No, no CEO wakes up in the morning thinking that they need to go address a quality problem or they need to go invest in QA automation. You know, they’re not thinking about that. You know, the CEO, the CEO, the CFO, the CIO, the executives wake up and they’re thinking about how can I grow my.
00:05:29 Kevin Kelly
Business how can I enable sales or distribution or on the operation side how can I achieve better operational excellence and how can I get better you know process automation, better throughput you know more widgets per hour, that type of stuff. So that’s what.
00:05:49
Yes.
00:05:50 Kevin Kelly
As executives wake up thinking about and that’s what we lose sleep over. But that’s also where QA can come in and play a big role in helping to solve some of those fundamental challenges.
00:06:00 Gary Tyreman
Like from a from a strategic.
00:06:03 Gary Tyreman
Perspective Q QA generally within IT or within organizations is not a core competence. However, it is an enabler, right? So if you connect those two dots strategic enablement, it might be the red headed stepchild in some regards.
00:06:23 Gary Tyreman
But it’s expected or understood that is necessary right? Quality is expected. It’s a desired outcome.
00:06:30 Gary Tyreman
So how does a how did you navigate that with over your career? Because as you said, people don’t expect that they expect the outcome, but they don’t get up in the morning. Ohh Gee, I need I need something until their hair’s on fire, right. And then by then it’s a little bit late. Ironically, Pun intended to buy insurance when your house is on fire.
00:06:51 Gary Tyreman
So how did you navigate that?
00:06:54 Kevin Kelly
So. So in in my experience, Terry you.
00:07:00 Kevin Kelly
You need to find kind of what is the burning platform and what is the organization really focused on and different organizations at different phases of their growth cycle can be focused on different things. Sometimes they’re laser focused on distribution and growth or organic growth.
00:07:20 Kevin Kelly
Sometimes they’re focused on inorganic growth, maybe through an M&A activity.
00:07:27 Kevin Kelly
Other times, maybe in in a period of economic contraction, they focus more on operational excellence and trying to, you know, get better margins out of what they have. So in my experience, you would depending on where the organization was and the various economic and growth cycles.
00:07:47 Kevin Kelly
On you try to identify the top, you know two or three things that are actually moving the.
00:07:53 Kevin Kelly
Needle for the organization of that particular point in time and focus your Technology Strategy, Technology Strategy in general in QA and quality as a piece of that and a very important piece, but around whatever is going to move the needle for the organization at that point in time and try to align the tech strategy with the business strategy.
00:08:16 Kevin Kelly
Because we are not here as technologists, you know we like to. We like to think about the new technologies.
00:08:22 Kevin Kelly
And you know, how can we apply them and how can we deploy them in our organization. But it’s not about the technology. It’s really about the business and what the business is trying to achieve. So you have to get your Technology Strategy aligned and lockstep laser focus with that business strategy and then the QA focus comes right.
00:08:42 Kevin Kelly
Along with that.
00:08:43 Gary Tyreman
Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense, especially the per the point about IT is a is an enabler to the business strategy, right? It it’s, it’s how things get.
00:08:55 Gary Tyreman
Done. And certainly the area that’s going to get the attention when growth is encumbered because of problems either from an application bug for lack of better word defect I think is the appropriate word today. And then with respect to growth.
00:09:15 Gary Tyreman
Driving growth that’s measured via policies per hour is, is that right? And applications per hour policies per day. So if there’s if the IT organization systems, the back end can’t support and deliver that applications per.
00:09:32 Gary Tyreman
Are policies per day metric? Is that? Is that how growth would be measured?
00:09:36 Kevin Kelly
Yeah, yeah, the operational metrics are a little bit different depending on which part of the organization you’re in. But certainly, for new business growth and new business sales, you know there are obviously annual goals that get broken down into monthly goals from a a top line revenue perspective. And then that of course thing.
00:09:57 Kevin Kelly
Is broken down into. OK, you know her type line revenue target is X. What do I need to be doing daily to achieve that and everything that’s focused?
00:10:08 Kevin Kelly
Around that, and not only is it about OK once, once the application from an insurance, so you get an insurance app and house either you know some people still have manual paper apps, but a lot of stuff of course is EF these days. But not only like when it’s in house, how do you do it?
00:10:28 Kevin Kelly
But you know you’re looking two or three months down the line.
00:10:33 Kevin Kelly
From a distribution standpoint and how are you going to generate that future distribution pipeline and how are you goanna get sales coming in in the future? So it’s not only about what’s happening today, it’s how are you enabling your field force to sell tomorrow and next week and next month?
00:10:51 Gary Tyreman
Now if I drill down in into some detail on that you mentioned the word pipeline. So I’m going to think of that slightly different. The pipeline I’m looking at or thinking of is from an application through underwriting that decisioning process all the way in.
00:11:09 Gary Tyreman
To issuance of a policy, all that gobbledygook, the compliance around that, there’s a fair amount of data in the application. The data itself is, is it correct to say output from 1 system as an input to another?
00:11:30 Gary Tyreman
System and then process through.
00:11:33 Gary Tyreman
Is that correct to say and is? Is that not an area where a lot of challenges errors can occur?
00:11:40 Kevin Kelly
Yeah, it. It is scary. So you know, so you’re going to you’re going to buy a relatively even if it’s a really relatively simple product that that you.
00:11:53 Kevin Kelly
And go by, you know there are multiple phases that you go through. There are multiple processes and that the policyholder that’s applying for the product is going through that the agent or the distribution channel.
00:12:07 Kevin Kelly
Is going through you typically you have a system for the app, the electronic application that you know, oftentimes it’s filled out by the in-policy holder. The in consumer, sometimes it’s completed by the agent and that can vary a little bit depending on what channel.
00:12:27 Kevin Kelly
The business is coming through, you know, is it is it direct to consumer? Is it coming through a captive agent? Is it a bank or broker dealer type channel, so there can be some variations and there’s different platforms that originate the business.
00:12:41
That tip.
00:12:43 Kevin Kelly
Then comes to an integration type mechanism into the carrier, where it then goes through an underwriting process, you know might go into some underwriting in June or rules in June what requirements are necessary to do to underwrite the business.
00:13:02 Kevin Kelly
Does it require medical records? Does it require you know you know all that type of stuff?
00:13:10 Kevin Kelly
For the underwriters to make their decision and then once you get all of the requirements fulfilled, so you know you have all the information to be able to do the underwriting, then how does that occur? Does it need to go through a full medical underwriting? Does a human underwriter need to look at it? Does it go through some type of rules?
00:13:29 Kevin Kelly
And generally, get some scoring and weighting applied to it. And then yeah, you know, some of the sophisticated carriers are kind of doing some automatic underlying underwriting on the simpler policies and sometimes even if a human being is going to.
00:13:46 Kevin Kelly
Got it. You know the systems will give a waiting and a scoring to kind of give the underwriter, you know the systems opinion on what it should be. So you might still have a human being making the decision or validating the inputs that are coming out of the underwriting engine. But we try as much as we can to.
00:14:07 Kevin Kelly
Automate and streamline the flow and so quality becomes really critical in these not only.
00:14:15 Kevin Kelly
The quality of the integrations between these different systems, but the more and more that that we as insurance carriers try to automate this stuff, do we automate the right thing? Are we getting the right output? Are we getting the right outcome and so QA becomes a really critical driver on all of that stuff.
00:14:35 Gary Tyreman
So if I were to, I’m going to make a statement and I I believe it to be correct, but it sounds like because of the desire for digitization and the all the benefits that come from that in terms of time to market for product launches and.
00:14:52 Gary Tyreman
What have you if?
00:14:54 Gary Tyreman
The QA process is not automated for that data. That flow of data from system to system. So one thing is wrong, the data file is incomplete or inaccurate in either dimension. That seems like it could be a whole world of hurt to.
00:15:13 Gary Tyreman
That downstream process.
00:15:15 Kevin Kelly
Yeah, it is a whole world of hurt, the downstream process, but even worse than that, Gary. So you know it, it’s really bad day if on these funding systems, if you have something in front of a a, A policy holder or an agent and it’s wrong, you don’t want to have to go back to your to your agent, your distribution, your sales team and most importantly, you don’t have to go back to the.
00:15:37 Kevin Kelly
The consumer, the policyholder that’s trying to buy product from you and tell them that you had a problem in your.
00:15:44 Kevin Kelly
So that the product wasn’t configured correctly or there was an option that they selected that they shouldn’t have been able to select. So yes, it can come up the works downstream, but most importantly you don’t want to come up the works upstream on you know, because it’s not just that one policy, it becomes a brand.
00:16:04 Kevin Kelly
Issue reputational issue. You know you have if you if you mess that up clearly you messed it up for that one consumer.
00:16:12 Kevin Kelly
But more importantly for your distribution channel, you want to be easy to do business with. Easy to work with and have high, high quality and expected outcomes for the insurance agents themselves. And if you don’t, you can create some brain damage very quickly.
00:16:30 Gary Tyreman
I appreciate that. Sounds like we’re.
00:16:34 Gary Tyreman
Kind of getting towards the end of it, of our, of our conversation. But you know, there’s so many different ways I I could drill in because that that seems to be an area that is critical, right. While people validate multiple parts of the system or systems across the business.
00:16:53 Gary Tyreman
Close.
00:16:54 Gary Tyreman
There’s not. There’s not an A feasible, simplistic way of getting into the details like that. You know, I could drill in that all day long was like we should have another conversation maybe and then that we can drill into some of the other aspects of that and you know, but in in partying, I think we have a couple minutes is there.
00:17:15 Gary Tyreman
Is there one piece of advice that you would offer a fellow CIO of an insurance carrier small, mid size New York life obviously is larger. They had resources, but a lot of the smaller mid size firms don’t have the resourcing, so they need to.
00:17:34 Gary Tyreman
Kind of play, play or coach perhaps, but is there a piece of advice you’d give him?
00:17:38 Kevin Kelly
Yes, it’s a good question, Gary. The one thing I might say to people that sit in that that role and not just the CIO’s, but even the operational executives, CEO type, type of folks talks about technology and we talked about how can technology be a strategic and.
00:17:59 Kevin Kelly
Enabler to the business and those are good and appropriate conversations. We should be talking about that as well, but.
00:18:07 Kevin Kelly
How do you enable technology and I think a lot of times, you know IT executives in general, we know that we need to do testing. We know that we need to do QA, but sometimes it maybe not afterthought but it’s something on the back end of the process, right? It it’s a necessary evil that that we do.
00:18:27 Kevin Kelly
But I I believe if you do it correctly and you know we use it for a shift left a little bit.
00:18:34 Kevin Kelly
But quality and QA can be a strategic enabler to the IT function and therefore to the overall enterprise. You know my advice to executives, whether they’re operational or technology executives would be how can you make quality, how do you build quality into the process.
00:18:56 Kevin Kelly
Right. And it’s not about software testing, it’s not necessarily about.
00:19:00 Kevin Kelly
Automation. It’s a mindset. How do you get a quality-oriented mindset and build it into your product development process, your delivery process, your operational processes and how do you really make that a core competency? Because if you do quality well, it’s going to show up, you’re going to see better.
00:19:20 Kevin Kelly
Gross.
00:19:21 Kevin Kelly
On your sales and distribution side, you’re going to see better turn around times. You know we talked about how many apps per day, an hour and stuff like that. You know you get better operational excellence when you can drive all of all the bugs and all of the kinks out of the system.
00:19:41 Kevin Kelly
A different mindset and a different discipline, different way to.
00:19:43 Kevin Kelly
Think about it.
00:19:44 Gary Tyreman
That’s great. Listen, I appreciate taking the time, Kevin. It’s always a pleasure. And we’ll have to do this again.
00:19:52 Kevin Kelly
Absolutely. My. My pleasure, Gary. Thank you.