The Business problem
Our International Insurance client had a Data Warehouse in place
and functioning well for over 10 years. During that time their
business needs and processes changed quite dramatically.
They now needed to utilize and track their Reinsurance
Involvements more accurately. Impacted by new regulations,
their maturing business model developed. It was becoming more
difficult to react in time to their changing business
environment.
They realized that certain fundamental decisions in their
original Data Warehouse were restricting their ability to
accurately report some of their reinsurance data and severely
curtailing their ability to modify the Warehouse to address the
problem.
It became clear that it was time to replace the Data Warehouse
with a more flexible one to keep pace. However the challenge was
how to start such an undertaking, and how to ensure that the
subsequent Data Warehouse truly ended up being flexible, agile and
not burdened with the existing design flaws.
There was little appetite for a large scale, high risk, high
cost Data Warehouse project within the organization as recessionary
pressures loomed on the horizon.
Issues Faced and Overcome
The biggest challenge centered around the complexity of the data
required for Reinsurance reporting. Regulations regarding reporting
of involvement with Reinsurance providers were requiring a very
detailed analysis of the reinsurers premium, risk, claim and
reserve details.
The information was spread across many very low level detailed
records involving multiple related companies that in some cases
needed to be represented as one corporate entity. These details
also needed to be combined with internal ratings of our clients'
perception of the stability of each reinsurer by way of classifying
how exposed they may be in dealing with various reinsurers.
The key to overcoming this complexity was user involvement. We
modeled the solution with the various impacted users over a series
of sessions, repeatedly testing their view of how the data needed
to be represented against what was actually available. The result
was a solution that had significant user buy in at the outset and
was far superior to one that IT may have developed in isolation in
trying to deliver what IT thought the users
needed.
Client Value Obtained
Our client obtained value on multiple fronts:
- They had a technology in place that would allow them to migrate
to a new Data Warehouse with limited risk, while not disrupting
their existing dependencies on the legacy Data Warehouse.
- They leveraged the Kalido Tools to design and build a new
warehouse structure with End User collaboration not achieved in
prior development efforts.
- With a managed platform approach they are now able to
independently manage their Data Warehouse development processes and
not be critically dependant on individuals with proprietary
knowledge of their Data Warehouse infrastructure
- They can now leverage a platform that will allow them to take
their Data related initiatives to the next level and start
considering how they can address various Master Data Management and
Data Governance requirements that have been traditionally
avoided due to the complexity of integrating them into their
existing Data Warehouse infrastructure.