Seguros Monterrey New York Life
Contact Information
Contact person: Jorge Alvarado
Email address: [email protected]
Contact number: 525553269056
REGION
North America
Award Category
The Digital Insurer Insurance Innovation Award
The five reasons why Seguros Monterrey New York Life should win The Digital Insurer Global Livefest 2018 Innovation Award.
Seguros Monterrey New York Life (SMNYL) is an mayor player in the Mexican Insurance Industry that focuses on Life Insurance and Major Medical Expenses Health Insurance. I am delighted to put to your consideration one of the most ambitious projects our company has successfully executed over the past 10 years and a keystone for our Digital Future. As for any transformational initiative, this one demanded the effort of the entire organization plus, a very innovative way to rethink our technological infrastructure with reduced obsolesce and operational risk.
The project we believe deserves this year´s innovation award is the Data Center Workloads Migration and Consolidation from on-premises facilities to a single certified facility managed by a specialized vendor.
As a specialized financial institution, SMNYL’s core competencies and main concerns have always been crystal clear with its employees and customer: to support our policyholders whenever they need us.
By the end of 2017, SMNYL had our data centers hosted on our own premises. As for many well-established companies, this was the result of years of different approaches towards how to maintain technological assets under close sight and jurisdiction but trading off agility and elasticity to adapt to changes.
SMNYL, a company with more than 75 years in the market, with a renewed Executive staff has gone from an on-premise, insource-all mindset to an understanding on how non-core competence can be as good or even better executed by technological allies to play along with the ever-changing market challenges.
Those calculated exchanges have been deeply analyzed mainly for those services that have reached a commodity status. Those services are great candidates for outsourcing to strategic corporate partners with both broader and deeper set of technological practices and skills.
One of the services meeting that criteria was precisely SMNYL’s Data Centers requiring improvements and having significant needs for growth. Our IT department exposed to the Board of Directors those facts and challenges along with a proposal to solve this problem from its roots: to seek out in the market an alliance with a technological partner to bring the best of services as well as an updated and upgraded infrastructure to address SMNYL’s potential risks and concerns. On the paper, the initiative proved to be both, sustainable and cost-efficient; this fact allowed to project team to engage executive commitment.
This innovative process truly began when this initiative and challenge was exposed to our potential partners. To make this selection we had a very clear requirement in our minds: it would be unacceptable to make any change in infrastructure that could disrupt our customers' experience.
Thus, we decided to issue a request to market participants for a non-standard data center collocation solution but a design which could allow us to move our data center workloads from legacy on-premise data centers to state-of-the-art infrastructure and world-class facilities in Mexico.
We received several proposals from the top vendors with different interpretations of our desired outcome. Proposals varied from quite common colocation recipes to bold technical designs to address our request.
SMNYL deserves to win this award because of the following achievements:
1) Innovation required from start.
We brought-in the best multinational service providers the Mexican market could offer and disclosed our challenges and more importantly the business outcome we wanted to achieve. This action required courage to look for unconventional set of requirements which made our potential partners invest in a serious way to find out how to deliver our core requirement: an innovative way to make a data center migration with no disruption over business operations and in a record time.
2) Innovative techniques executed successfully.
We built a successful partnership with a major player in data center services in Mexico. Together we defined a way to relocate SMNYL workloads by waves of application and services bounded by business processes. At the end, this enterprise resulted in zero impact to business operations.
3) Overall project results.
This project was successfully executed within time, scope and budget. The formula: we critically defined our milestones and once in place, we played to win in every one of them. We all had a clear goal in mind: to keep gaining momentum and Executive Trust. We had to deliver results with quality and in a very aggressive schedule. With a well-qualified project management office in place, we tracked every hour of the execution of every single one of the 10 waves doing both, communicating timely and creating engagement in all-levels of the organization.
4) Changing mindsets.
As a company with a record of keeping things very close to its chest, we decided to build alliances to bring stronger foundations for our innovation journey. This is difficult for a company with more than 75 years in the market. A profound adjustment in the way we deliver our services, implied mindset shifts and a sincere and humble admission that there were some things we are better at than others, but equally important was to recognize non-core areas were other were better and that we were willing to outsource. In retrospective, this act of humble introspection was key to detonate our transformation.
5) Solid foundations to ensure Long-term results.
During the entire project, we kept a clear vision and we worked accordingly. We had to build a close-knit team and reached a flow state where the weakness of the person was overridden by team collaboration on numerous occasions. We knew that making this happen would allow us to increase the credibility in our team, something vital to a digital transformation journey.
As part of SMNYL I can´t stress enough how proud we all feel by this tremendous success. It definitively sets a cornerstone towards our digital transformation. But the most important achievement was not in the technological field, but in how our team proved this company is built by committed people who understand how to make significant things happen - always with our customers in mind which is our only reason to exist.