Insurance company harnesses Power BI and Office 365 to boost collaboration and productivity
Toby Ingleton |
Liberty Mutual Insurance Group is working with Microsoft to improve its use of data analytics and allow for employees across different departments and geographies to share insight.
With more than 50,000 employees at 900 locations around the world, Liberty Mutual works to tackle the issues faced within the insurance space on a large scale.
Established entities within the industry are however facing competition from internet start-ups, which are well placed to use cloud and mobile technologies. Such competitors are looking to disrupt Liberty Mutual’s value chain.
For this reason, the company must endeavour to stay one step ahead of threats and take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves. To help achieve this, the company is transforming its IT approach.
Writing in a blog post, James McGlennon, executive vice president and CIO at Liberty Mutual, said that the aim is to ‘better position us for future success and meet the evolving expectations of our customers and employees.’
McGlennon says that as part of this, the scale and expertise of the company’s global workforce is being harnessed.
“Innovation and breakthrough ideas can come from anywhere in our company, and as we transform, it’s essential that we enable our employees to improve and collaborate, regardless of location,” he said. “Teams sharing insights across India, Turkey, Portugal or Spain, and the US, for example, can power the development of product breakthroughs that we import and export around the world.”
Office 365 is helping Liberty Mutual react more quickly to changes in the market.
“We are moving to a more agile development process, where smaller, multi-disciplinary employee groups will collaborate on new products more efficiently, bridging the gap between IT and the business,” said McGlennon. “With chat-based, real-time collaboration, we’ll increase the proportion of people across the company who work together to build innovative new products in a continuous development model so we can grow our business in the digital age.”
By working with Microsoft, Liberty Mutual is able to place business analytics tools in the hands of staff from a variety of departments, such as claims, legal, reinsurance and HR. Workers on these teams can easily analyse and gain insight from information dashboards and key performance indicators via Power BI. These come in digestible visual forms.
“Millennials entering the business through our internship programs expect a mobile, connected workplace, which is why we are focused on online document storage to access and share documents without the pitfalls and versioning issues of email, all while keeping security a top priority,” McGlennon said. “The security of sharing documents within the Office 365 platform means we can move collaboration and productivity to the forefront of our employees’ experience, without worrying about inappropriate access to files. Azure Active Directory simplifies how we manage user identity and access policies while we enjoy the benefits of having all our documents available on a smartphone, mobile device or laptop.”
McGlennon concludes by saying that going forward, Liberty Mutual is aiming to attract top technology talent and leverage emerging technologies to innovate and improve its working practices.
“These products and solutions are critical to our future success and will enable us to meet the changing expectations of our customers,” he said.