As the insurance and reinsurance markets are changing and the footprint of digitalization grows at high speed, Munich Re speeds up innovative activities and explores new business models.
Munich Re IT is confronted with a new quality of requests as well as a new urge to deliver more flexibly and at higher speed. Therefore we changed our way of working and adopt agile principles in IT and increasingly on the business side. We currently work hard to position IT as a part of business rather than a service unit and try to actively drive business initiatives instead of just being in the wings and wait for service requests.This is a challenge for business – to accept IT in a new role and also for IT – to change their mindset and fill this new role.
By now, IT supports all kinds of innovative business initiatives based on new technologies, blockchain, IoT, Big Data, and cloud setups. Furthermore, IT focuses on moving our data centers into a public cloud setup where possible to increase flexibility for the future and save cost in the long run.
From a sourcing perspective, we move activities that are stable and well understood over to be managed end to end by outsourcing providers – mainly based out of India – and focus the internal workforce on exploring new technologies, making them useful for our business.
We dive into paradigms like DevOps and automation and we plan to implement MS Office 365 in a cloud setup.
I would enjoy discussions on any of those topics to find out what we can learn from peers and how we can improve IT performance – especially discussions on the connection of IT and business would be welcome.