IT Assessment & Roadmap: Helping a Receivership Office Close Estates Faster

Situation: A Mission That Depended on Speed

The office's mission was to manage the estates of insolvent insurers efficiently and maximize what claimants received. Its goals were concrete: close more estates each year, hit productivity targets, and give staff easy access to data and reports. Its technology made all of that harder.

Challenge: Legacy Systems, Little Integration, No Way to Measure

• A legacy platform of aging applications, hardware and architecture.
• One-off solutions with no integration between claims, reinsurance, tax and accounting, so data was entered more than once.
• No business intelligence: almost every report was a custom request, and leadership couldn't measure performance.
• A large amount of paper, no data retention policy, and a disaster recovery plan that had never been tested.
• No formal IT governance or process for defining and approving IT projects.

Action: Interviews, a SWOT and a Clarity Workshop

Current state. The team interviewed leaders and staff across 13 areas: senior management, estate planning, claims, claim services and records, reinsurance, accounting and finance, tax and compliance, special projects, legal, human resources, administrative services, takeovers and IT. Each interview covered business processes, applications, gaps, technology and support.

Findings. The results were organized by people, process and technology, each with what was working and where the opportunities were, and summarized in a SWOT. Strengths included knowledgeable, dedicated staff, strong and visible leadership, clean audits and an early dashboard effort. The biggest gaps were alignment between IT and business strategy, integration, reporting and resilience.

The Clarity Workshop. Instead of handing over a report, the team brought 16 leaders and team members together for a half-day working session. They reviewed the SWOT and current-state findings, debated future-state needs, and agreed on the critical success factors: operational efficiency, the ability to measure performance, easy access to data, maintainable systems and risk mitigation. They also named the likely barriers, including funding, culture change, training and staff skills.

Future-state initiatives came out of the workshop across nine areas:

• Reporting and analytics: one data source for management dashboards, key metrics and ad hoc reporting.
• Integration: claims, reinsurance, tax and accounting working from shared data.
• Finance: an integrated, estate-based accounting system from takeover to closure.
• Claims: better use of existing tools and options to outsource processing.
• Project management: a methodology for managing estates and IT projects, with tracking tools.
• IT: a security audit, ITIL-based processes, a development lifecycle, a stronger help desk and an updated disaster recovery plan.
• Takeovers: compliance preparation and a checklist for how long takeover activities should take.
• Human resources: better integration between the HR, time and payroll systems.
• Document management: imaging and workflow in place of physical storage.

Result: One Vision Leadership Built Together

Leadership left the workshop with validated findings, agreed priorities and the criteria for judging every initiative: funding, return and benefit. Those became the basis for the end-state recommendations and the IT roadmap, and the client considered the engagement a success.

Why it matters: Assessments fail when leadership reads the findings for the first time in the final report. A working session before the report turns findings into decisions the leadership team owns.

This engagement was led by Don Hook as a Vice President at The Revere Group, before he founded Full On Consulting. Client details are withheld.