Communicate

Bridge communication boundaries with IRBI

Many organizations are bogged down by gaps in communication due to the diverse backgrounds of the people that work in them. Organizational terminology is often not centrally categorized, and thus is interpreted differently by different members of the organization due to their unique experience and background in the industry. In fact, the most dangerous part of this lack of cohesiveness is that sometimes the communication gap is not even spotted because everyone thinks they share the same understanding of a term or organizational structure when there actually is a severe misalignment. This can reverberate and magnify into problems such as project failure and cause setbacks in progress towards organizational goals.

The IRBI aids in resolving communication problems by primarily relying on a visual approach to organizational models. The visual approach allows organizational members to gain an understanding of overall scope. Also, the fore matter in each chapter preceding the visual charts has a precise description of common organizational terminology, which allows people of different backgrounds within an organization to develop a common understanding of organizational terms.

Key Points:

● Obstacles to communication

○  People have diverse backgrounds, interpret terminology based on their own experiences

○ Everyone tends to interpret based on their background

○ Result is misalignment of understanding/miscommunication/lack of understanding that understanding itself is misaligned

● How the blueprint helps

○ Visual view of all-relevant items on one page - everyone gets complete picuture and cannot be on different page!

○  Description in each term, so that people from different background can develop a common understanding irrespective of their background

Execute

Any business nowadays has an extreme dependence on technology, and this is especially true in the insurance industry, where more and more transactions are relying on computers. This means that technology is a critical part of any insurance process, and executives have to take efforts to ensure technology is available for business efforts.

The IRBI equips executives with the ability to trace the business model of the organization to elements of the information systems model and technology model. This allows executives to greatly simplify the technology aspect of their business transformation features by determining which technological components are crucial to their organization’s operation, which technologies are necessary for pending business efforts, and which technologies are already available in the organization’s application portfolio.

Key Points

● Allows assessment of information technology requirements as part of business transformation planning

● For planning transformation, executives use the blueprint to trace all the way from the Business Model to the Information Systems Model and the Technology Model

Assess and Adjust

Metrics are a hugely important part of defining organizational goals and measuring achievement towards those goals. Without metrics, it is impossible to concretely define “success” and “failure”, and thus projects towards organizational goal achievement often are poorly defined in scope and often go over budget or fail to accomplish their purpose.

The business model of the IRBI places a heavy emphasis on defining and explaining some key strategic measures that are used by CEOs for measuring the progress of their companies at the end of the year. The IRBI also links these measures with business elements (functions, roles, locations, events, data) in order to provide an end-to-end traceability to scope specific business elements that need to be changed in order to produce a positive change in their related metrics. This results in efficiency in business transformation: as only a small fraction of organizational functions affect a measure, time and money are not spent in optimizing functions that do not need to be optimized, and some unnecessary functions can even be marked for removal in this way. This results in the ability for continuous improvement: as transformational efforts no longer require massive expenditures of time and money, the organization can be systematically analyzed via its blueprint for inefficiencies and be improved in punctuated steps over time.

Key Points

Forming a Continuous Improving Program with IRBI

●  Metrics are a hugely important part of defining goals and measure achievement towards goals

●  Business model of IRBI provides key strategic measures that are used by the executives for measuring progress of their company at the end of the year

● Coupled with end-to-end traceability of metrics with business functions, roles, locations, events, data provides end-to-end visibility to scope items that need to be  considered for making a positive impact on those metrics

●  If one of the metrics does not hit the mark, it can be traced to via the mapping to functions that need to be addressed for improvement

● Only a small fraction of functions of the organization affect these measures

Convince

Having a blueprint on hand makes it much easier to communicate strategies in both a high-level and a detailed way to stakeholders. The high-level description of a strategy is critical to providing a summary of a business transformation effort, but without details, it can be difficult to convince stakeholders to buy into the idea since its implementation comes off as fuzzy and indeterminate. Conversely, a strategy that is communicated with all the required details (technology buys, process improvements, etc.) appears very well-defined to stakeholders, making it easy to convince them.

Blueprint supplies all of the required details to the executives in terms of what, why, how, who, when and where.

Key Points

●  With all the details in hand, communicating strategies is easier

Any strategy is communicated with all the required details (technology buys, process improvements, etc.), making it easy to convince stakeholders

Blueprint supplies all of the required details to the executives in terms of what, why, how, who, when and where.

Consistent level of understanding across organization

Having a consistent understanding of all elements of operations across the organization can have many advantages in synergizing the actions and avoiding troubles.

However, as an industry professional, one would have often noticed that different individuals have different level of understanding of any given concept. If one quizzes five individuals collaborating on any given project, he/she would easily get five different understanding of processes involved, roles involved, information involved and the systems involved. All this difference is not a bit issue, however it does take lot of communication (read hours of meetings and emails) to get everyone somewhat aligned towards a common understanding required to meet the goals.

This process can be lot easier with use of Industry Reference Blueprint.

People in insurance organizations tend to have diverse backgrounds built from years of experience in the same or different organizations. Over period, individuals across this diverse background get used to call certain things in a certain way. Also, not everyone is aware of entire breadth of operations in an insurance organization. As a result, one would often observe communication gaps within the organization and even outside. Where two individuals and groups may assume that they have reached common understanding only to find out that there assumption was based on different meaning of a certain set of terms.Without a reference point, it usually is very difficult to ascertain if there are variants of what the person/organization may be used to refer something.

Let’s consider an example; the global Harmonized Tariff and customs code published by International Customs Organization allows global trading partners and governments to have a common description of any commodity. This results in avoiding mistakes, communication gaps and interpretation disputes. Conversely, such mistakes and interpretation disputes are common in the insurance industry. One may not realize this off the bat, but if one sits back and analyzes meetings and emails of one week alone, the person will realize how much time investment had gone in to bring everyone on to a common definition of day-to-day things. And, this happens week-after-week.

Reference Blueprint, with its detailed description of business model, information systems model and technology models take this level setting across the whole organization. Now, everyone can refer to the central reference point. Will the single publication solve the problem entirely? No, it would not though it will be a significant solution with its wide reach across entire gamut of business processes, roles, events, locations, information entities and technology systems. No other resource brings this level of cross-disciplinary consistency.  To add the topping on the ice-cream, one can easily augment the reference blueprint with many trade dictionaries available which go to the next level of detail and explain day-to-day operational terms including those used in policy wording, claims handling, accounting and other key functions.

Having a consistent vocabulary across the organization can have many advantages in synergizing the actions and avoiding troubles. Likely as an existing industry professional, one would already have many practical examples to share from his/her own experience already. And every such individual will be able to readily appreciate the value of common vocabulary and how a common reference point across the organization can help meet the objective. Trust, that if you have got to this point, you have what it takes to do it. Good luck!