Designing a Data Consolidation Strategy for a Fast-Growing Insurance Brokerage Company
In the competitive insurance landscape, data is vital to a company’s operations and growth, and can be a valuable differentiator. However, a common obstacle companies can experience is that their data becomes fragmented, replicated, and siloed. This environment impacts their ability to leverage data for business decisions, as well as preserve and grow enterprise value. So, when an insurance brokerage company experienced fast growth, they realized they required a comprehensive data consolidation strategy to better organize and protect their data. They knew they needed a partner with data strategy capabilities and deep insurance knowledge to perform a full system review and build a roadmap toward their desired goals. So, they turned to UDig to design their strategic path forward.
STRATEGIC SNAPSHOT
Challenge
Fast growth combined with decentralized data was impacting our client’s ability to use data for business decisions and improve their marketing effectiveness.
Strategy
A fixed-price data strategy accelerator that allowed us to create a plan that aligns with their business priorities and growth goals.
Outcome
A data strategy and roadmap that, once built, will enable everyone to better know how profitable business lines are, leverage data downstream, and use data to do their best work.
Challenge: Disparate Data Sources Impact Reporting and Business Development
As a fast-growing company, our client was quickly becoming a leader within the insurance brokerage industry. However, without a unified data consolidation strategy, they were not properly set up to completely trust their data and leverage it for insights into their business development. A main aspect of their growth strategy involved acquisitions. But this strategy resulted in decentralized data and a hindered path to growth.
Without centralized data management capabilities, they were experiencing the following challenges:
- No single source of truth (SSoT): Their data was spread across multiple departments and lacked a central location for aggregating all data.
- Lack of checks and balances: Without a checks-and-balance system in place to protect data, their data was left vulnerable.
- Difficulty reporting: Their decentralized data meant they had difficulty reporting on business priorities without relying on individual interpretations of what the data meant.
- Redundancies in how they worked: Through each acquisition, redundant roles and processes emerged in how they managed data, creating inefficient workflows that affected the bottom line.
Further, a lack of data strategy occasionally led to their team to focus on the wrong priorities. This environment meant they were impacting their ability to improve sales and marketing effectiveness against their business development goals.
Strategy: Develop a Unified Data Strategy with a Defined Roadmap
Applying our deep insurance knowledge and experience executing data strategy engagements, we promptly created a plan to develop their unified data strategy. To do so, we supported them through this four-step process:
Step 1: Conduct a Discovery Phase
First, we learned more about their current versus future states, and how leaders and groups across the company were using data. We conducted interviews and reviewed their systems and documentation, with insurance experts guiding all discussions. From there, we delivered our findings for review and analysis.
Step 2: Develop Their Plan
Using our findings, we designed a plan that addressed their unique priorities and requirements for key data analytics, reports, and KPIs. This step enabled us to build their data classification plan.
Step 3: Define Future State Architecture
Working closely with our client, we defined a target state for data capabilities that would enable data and analytic needs. We aligned these priorities with their reporting environments and tools.
Step 4: Create Their Strategic Roadmap
We designed a roadmap that included all tasks, projects, and activities that supported the target-state data capabilities. We also defined the timeline for delivering the roadmap’s target-state goals. Our ultimate objective was to enable their valuable data to improve their business decisions.
Outcome: A Robust Data Consolidation Strategy to Improve Business Results
Today, this insurance brokerage company has a more flexible system for managing their data backed by a detailed roadmap customized to their specific target-state goals. The roadmap also includes identifying a SSoT for aggregating disparate data into a single location that consolidates their data history. Their unified governance strategy enables data safety and compliance, further safeguarding their company. This environment allows them to improve their business development and marketing effectiveness by having trusted data to inform their goals and decisions. Once they implement their data consolidation strategy, they can use their data to increase sales and profitability, know how profitable product lines are, and how and why to leverage data downstream. As a result, they can provide faster and more accurate pricing and products, improve their customer experiences — and better position business decisions for the future.
