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On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to John Johansen, a senior technology executive & operational leader with over 25 years of experience in consulting & executive roles. She is also joined by Steven Abel, partner at Oliver Wyman.

In this episode, the two guests want to challenge & change current operational mindsets within large enterprises. They dive into the known tech challenges existing within our currently fast evolving digitalizing insurance space, why an experimentation culture is critical to drive the relevance & resilience business needs today, what are the most effective paths for evolution, reinvention & consideration, & insights on how businesses can leverage tech ecosystems to scale digitally-driven revenue models.

KEY TAKEAWAYS         

• I started creating business applications when I was 13 years old & have been writing software ever since. I’ve been doing this in the insurance world for about 30 years. With Oliver Wyman we’ve been able to create a team that’s able to build tools at speed that really improve our clients’ businesses.
• InsurTechs have admirable qualities of being able to runs experiments & take them to investors & get feedback even in the early days then pivot on the back of those results. They can quickly create real, tangible products that people can touch, feel & react to which creates a new round of experimentation including more people giving feedback, more experimentation & more changes. We wanted to bring that into a corporate environment that didn’t have the experience of that agility.
• The idea of responsible innovation is super important. There’s nothing wrong with the big corporate machine because it does a lot of things well. It protects the risk agenda; it enables bullet-proof technology that’s very stable. We have a very large client that we’ve done innovation for & we’re beginning to scale that in the enterprise. We’re not thinking of this in three lanes: The innovation group, the BAU support group, and the enterprise architecture group.
• One of the things that’s fraught with peril in any IT organisation is when we go from development to beta tests, to launch, to productions support. Are we doing those things better? Is there less drama? Thinking through those early experiments & really demonstrating to people that the process is yielding that benefit/business change faster, with less investment, than an 18 month requirement process, an 18 month build & then a 12 month implementation. With the right experiments & stakeholder team we seeing those metrics trending in the right direction.

 

BEST MOMENTS

‘We’re still seeing some bureaucracy, which means it’s hard to maintain momentum. We wanted to break the bounds of the culture a progress in weeks not months.’
‘There’s a lot that we can do to improve business processes & be responsive to our business users by running small experiments.’
‘The most important part of measuring success starts with picking the right experiments up front.’
‘We can begin to measure by throughput: Is this process of experimentation actually getting us to faster, better business results, implementations, & hand-offs.’

ABOUT THE GUESTS

John Johansen is a seasoned senior technology executive & operational leader with a proven track record of success. Based in Naples, he brings extensive experience in driving growth & innovation within the technology sector. As part of Oliver Wyman, Johansen specializes in helping legacy corporations leverage startup culture to foster agility, accelerate digital transformation, & unlock new opportunities.

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Steve Abel is a dedicated partner at Oliver Wyman, leveraging his 25+ years of consulting & executive experience to help clients tackle intricate challenges & lead teams in delivering reliable insights. With a strong focus on smart technological implementation, Steve has a proven track record of generating value for organizations.

His extensive expertise encompasses program management, operations, shared services, enabling technologies, business process reengineering, finance best practices, insurance products & data, actuarial platforms, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud solutions, & business & technical architecture.

Steve's passion lies in assisting clients in achieving their strategic objectives & optimizing performance, all while cultivating a collaborative, innovative, & excellent work culture.

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ABOUT THE HOST

Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew, a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers & accelerating over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. 

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