CASE STUDY office ; scanning documents , putting them electronically and then dealing with them in the redistribution of the documents . At the moment we ’ re using paperless managed service of people dealing with that but when the actual information from the scanned paper comes to us , then we ’ re using our integration approach to work out who needs to be notified with what speed , and what systems , what is the overall integration of those incoming and outgoing documents . So , the paperless approach has been sped up .
But in terms of collaboration , if you ’ re told you have 24 hours to go home and continue working due to the COVID-19 lockdown , it ’ s all about the collaboration . However , in the IT world , I cannot and I don ’ t want to stipulate to my business what to use , because I have multiple businesses , multiple countries , multiple systems , multiple document management systems , multiple scanning , multiple workflow systems . So to enable that collaboration , I can ’ t tell everyone to stop what they ’ re doing and use Zoom or Microsoft Teams , but to be able to orchestrate traffic and to provide the right collaboration at the right time and not for people to have to copy documents in 20 places and keep an eye on 10 workflow systems . This is where the magic of IT has to be played out .
How do you maintain a competitive edge in such a demanding market ?
Very carefully . A competitive edge by definition is that I need to be better at something , but the question is , where ? Usually , the typical things to consider in our insurance value chain are how to understand risk , how to price risk , how to take care of customers ’ claims , how to not over-expose to claim . These are quite specific areas and as long as I know that certain areas of our IT landscape are providing competitive advantage to our business , I tend to protect those , I tend to be competitive by definition , and this is where our efforts go in terms of keeping something that is ours , ours .
How have APIs played a role in supporting Generali ’ s transition to a 100 % cloud-based environment by the end of 2020 ?
I hadn ’ t thought it through that deeply let ’ s say two or three years ago , because directionally , we knew that we had to integrate our pieces . What worked out very beautifully was when we started migrating the contents of our data centres to Infrastructure-as-a-Service , we had to make a very specific decision – do we shut down everything for a few days and then do the lift and shift in one go , take everything over our employees ’ long weekend or maybe tell the business not to come to work in August because we ’ re moving everything into the cloud ; or do I have a more incremental view where I say let ’ s analyse the applications , the data , the reporting and then migrate it gradually . And the only reason we have the comfort to actually make the choice between one big bang approach or gradually is because we had a good integration approach .
This is the advantage of having a good API approach because our business was unaware that we were physically moving things from data centres in London into data centres outside Amsterdam . This wouldn ’ t have been possible without the API approach we selected .
What benefits has the MuleSoft solution offered the end-user ?
I will refer back to the functionality , regulatory security and costs . So in terms of functionality ; the ability to compose new services , to compose new functionality , to compose new data feeds , very rapidly .
In terms of regulatory , we ’ re supporting the data lineage , providing absolute visibility of where the data flows have been before , the decision has been made on pricing on claims , as an example .
In terms of security , the majority of the security that we have had to do on the integration has been out of the box .
And then finally , the pricing . For our purposes , we selected the cloud offering from MuleSoft – the Integration Platform as-a-Service because it serves our needs . We are reassured by knowing that we can purchase additional power as and when needed , instead of committing to owning the infrastructure . Another factor that helped with the cost was using the professional services from MuleSoft .
When we started our development , we started within two weeks of selecting new software because we could use the cloud platform and using the professional services accelerated our development . Something that we thought could take up 12 – 18 months we did within six months . Referring back to the cost – that flexibility of the processing power that I can procure from MuleSoft means we can maintain our competitive edge . I don ’ t need to be paying flat fees 12 months a year , so it makes my life significantly easier .
How has the solution future-proofed the company ?
We have to imagine the future for the next 20 years because I ’ m sure something will take us by surprise 10 years from now . We have been predicting where the business is going , what kinds of business in terms of whether it will be along the same lines or whether it be new lines of business , what the level of granularity of services will be , because between all of the businesses that we serve we ’ re always looking at that level of granularity . We have been protecting the business needs , we have been projecting what regulatory requirements will be , what the capacity is going to be just by having a good grasp on how things will work for the next 20 years . This is how we selected the functionality , security , throughput and cost for what we pay for our API management and ESP implementation . • www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO
61