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RSA chief uncans insurance giant's mega IT infrastructure review

'Outsourcing hasn't worked,' says Price in new drive to digitise

TUPE, TUPE, it's off TUPE we go

Also out were notions of accountability, along with the keys to its technology strategy. Both were hurled over the walls into the tech vendors’ laps. Price, who actually oversaw RSA’s outsourcing in the Baltics as regional CIO, says this became a major problem with RSA as it lost control over its IT strategy.

“We found as we handed over to people, we didn’t have the right capability to manage an outsourcing contract in-house,” Price told us. “Your outsourcing contract is only as good as the way you manage and deliver that.”

“In the UK they weren’t out outsourcing deals – they were picking up people and responsibilities and TUPEing them across to Accenture and IBM. Our risk was those people coming up to retirement age – that’s a lot of knowledge we’d have lost.”

How does he want to change that?

“I want us to own architecture and design and core principles, working with the best partners in the market around emerging technology trends and looking to how the market is changing. At the moment we haven’t got that – we outsourced that to partners and it hasn’t worked. We have to bring that capability back in house.”

Price was named group CIO in May 2013, transitioning from COO of emerging markets where he’d been for three years. Almost immediately, Price began implementing change.

A swathe of IT, COO and CTO heads were replaced, starting in early 2013 and continuing right up to last month with four new hires from outside on his senior executive team. These include the former CIO of consumer bank Santander, Darren McKenzie, as COO for RSA UK and Western Europe, and Keith Kiernan, ex-head of transformation for O2 Ireland now COO for RSA Insurance Ireland.

If you see a common theme there, you should: tech people becoming operations chiefs – mirroring Price’s own career as an RSA COO and a CIO.

Drawing on his own past, Price sees power in this combination. “I was technical but I’m not a techie, although my career has developed through IT,” he said.

“The advantage is it lets you understand the end-to-end customer solution. Running call centers lets you understand and provide operational service and lets you understand the key elements you have to deliver to drive key outcomes.”

"It lets you think backwards from the business problem to a solution,” he continued, “but while understanding the alignment between products, operations, and technology that underpins it.”

Elsewhere, there’s been an emphasis on re-skilling at the strategic level by hiring core architects. “We are doing a lot of work around capability and operating model,” Price said. “We are having to build core capability in the business.

“I’m a big believer that within a function, people’s roles should be to act as the interface between the business and the technology, to capture the right requirements and deliver the right testing scripts and regression testing. That’s their job.”

Price wants to reset the existing relationship with outsourcers and issued an RFP for RSA’s infrastructure PCs, 15 data centres and help desk on June 1. Laptops and desktops are going from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 in a migration run by IBM and Accenture, which is due to be finished by the first quarter of 2016.

The work is mighty: re-packaging 2,000 mainframe, off-the-shelf and custom applications and moving from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange, Outlook and Yammer. “Everybody is surprised we are going to Windows 8.1. We are probably a FTSE 100 leader,” Price says. “We engaged the business – it wasn’t a technology decision.”

RSA call center, photo: RSA

Running call centres lets you understand and provide operational services, according to Price

But it’s the data centre mix and the mainframe that’s the really tricky thing, having become overly complicated through six mergers and acquisitions and as the individual companies that today comprised RSA Group have expanded.

The current infrastructure includes six data centres in Canada, either run by RSA or service provider CGI, two in the UK and in Ireland run by IBM, and one run by CSC in Scandinavia. One of the UK data centres in Sussex is home to the majority of the IT infrastructure and legacy apps. This integrates with SaaS providers and with AWS.

Not all the data centres run the same workloads; they are a mix of Windows and Linux. Price’s objective is for RSA’s business core of policy, billing, claims and BI to come off the current mainframe – which will get turned off – and moved to the heart of the IT infrastructure, so that changes become easier. This way of thinking will cascade through other, related areas of the insurance process and technology layers.

The software heart of RSA will become Guidewire and Accenture’s modular Duck Creek product that comes as SaaS for insurance, according to Price.

Next page: Cloud at heart

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