The Opportunity
As a $12B insurance and risk management juggernaut, countless opportunities exist for investing – whether it’s in real estate, information technology, acquisitions, or virtually any other area in which efficiencies, capacity or top-line revenue can be impacted.
For the firm’s leadership the problem has never been a lack in investment opportunities, but instead a consistent methodology for capturing, evaluating, and (if approved) monitoring them. Investment processes were often siloed in the parts of the organization from which they emerged – Legal, Finance, Facilities, IT, Human Resources, or Product teams.
In such an environment, understanding which investments can have the biggest impact is a complex challenge. A siloed approach also complicates the possibility of a cross-functional investment strategy in which multiple functions can invest in a coordination fashion. In a worst-case scenario, some parts of the organization may even invest in ways that undermine the investments made elsewhere.
As The firm sought options to bring a more informed, agile approach to its investment and portfolio management strategy, it turned to INRY to leverage the Power of Platform to enable the data capture critical as part of the first step of the overall process.
The Approach
The firm has long leveraged INRY as an engine for innovation, employing it for a wide range of global business services as well as IT and colleague experiences. As the organization sought an enterprise-scale solution to build an investment evaluation and oversight engine, the Application Portfolio Management (APM) built by INRY on a leading platform was an obvious choice. APM had been used to track the firm's application investments' performance, so its potential was well understood.
APM also provided core capabilities essential to modelling complex investment requests, including the concepts of the Business Service Portfolio, Taxonomy Layer (and Nodes), Business Service, Business Service Offering, and “Sell / Consume” services delivery and monitoring model relevant to this type of request.
With an underlying APM foundation already in place, the firm opted to leverage INRY to build an application “hub” at the heart of its Portfolio Investment Reporting (PIR) system to address these opportunities.
- Revenue Improvements: Areas in which the firm can grow top-line revenue through investment in new services, markets, or delivery mechanisms.
- Revenue Protections: Ways the firm can mitigate revenue-impacting risk to help ensure continuity of business and sustained growth.
- Efficiencies or Cost Avoidance: Captures opportunities for the organization to reduce the cost of services delivered without impacting their value.
- Compliance and Risk Mitigation: Identifies opportunities to drive better adherence to operational requirements or best practices and to mitigate the negative impact of business risks.
- Simplification, Automation, or Innovation: Captures investment proposals for work simplification or automation, adding to the firm’s strategic capacity of its teams.
The system includes multiple integrations into the firm systems of record facilitated through their enterprise data lake, which provides a system of record information for virtually all aspects of the business.
The Rewards
Implementing a transformational set of portfolio management capabilities like those described is something other than something that can be implemented at the flick of a switch. However, by defining a clear long-term roadmap that emphasized incremental progress and quick time to value, the combined firm and INRY team showed substantial value in just 6 months – with the system going live in November and reports with approval and forecast data going live in May.
By providing a system of interaction for the capture, review/approval, and tracking of investments across all enterprise functions, the firm has achieved significant benefits that enhance its competitive position in an ever-changing market, including:
- Enterprise-wide insight into investment opportunities allows the firm leaders to make informed decisions about those investments with the greatest return.
- Deep insight into portfolio performance to ensure that investments meet or exceed identified targets and to understand the cause of any underperformance.
- Improved business resilience thanks to a system that allows revenue protection, risk mitigation, efficiency, automation, and growth opportunities to be surfaced, evaluated, and implemented timely.
By accessing these benefits through a single environment where all stakeholders can interact to evaluate and monitor large-scale investments, the firm has transformed its business in critical ways that strengthen its competitive position and drive value for customers, colleagues, and shareholders. This powerful solution is a proof point of the possibilities that innovative technology can deliver when combined with expert delivery and configuration services provided by INRY.