 We have a presentation from India from Akshay Dhanak, vice-president, HDRC Standard Life Insurance Company Limited. Welcome Akshay. Akshay Dhanak comes with over 19 years of IT solutions and services experience in business transformation, governance, consulting and delivery execution. He has been leading the architecture function for the technology-enabled business transformation program, HDRC Life since 2012. Akshay, over to you. Good afternoon everybody, can you carry me like that? Thank you. It's an honor and privilege to be recognized by the open group for the contribution that we have made to the field of enterprise architecture. I have the privilege to present to you a very deep and comprehensive case study for the technology-enabled business transformation within HDRC Life, the objectives of which were accomplished through collaboration with a number of strategic partners. Deloitte, TCS and DEPRO are to name a few. It has been an endeavor that has been going on from past hopeless years. The first year was spent more in terms of understanding what our current landscape is, trying to scan what the ecosystem demands are and determine what specific capabilities we need to build in terms of meeting the needs of our customers, the distribution partners, the employees, and the product makers, including the regulators. I'm going to spend 30 minutes to take you through some of the important aspects of this program. I'll spend some time explaining to you the business context about life insurance industry within HDRC. How it differentiates itself from the counterparts in the West and the Middle East. I'll spend some time understanding what were the co-drivers for the technology-enabled business transformation program. I'd now like to spend a considerable amount of available time in sharing with you some critical experiences, the lessons you have, the scars, if you will, which has enabled me and the product team, HDSC Life, and the strategic partners in making the transformation the success that it is. I'll spend some time taking you through our vision statement, which is really empowering and also challenging at the same time. We want to be the most successful and admired life insurance companies. And this is how we want to achieve that. We want to be the most trusted company. Life insurance at its core is about trust. It is a very difficult conversation with the prospects and customers on why they need life insurance. Especially in a geography like India, we do not like to talk about unfortunate events that might happen in our life. We are not very comfortable expressing about the risks that we have to deal with. And those are the amenities we are going to happen someday. But as a culture, we are not evolved to understand and have a very candid conversation, a very elaborate conversation in terms of understanding those risks, trying to quantify it, and then look at what available options are. In the business of trust, it really matters that there is a human touch. But there are seven drivers of this ecosystem that require us to take a look at this human touch in a different way. The second part is that we want to be the easiest to deal with. This is a little difficult proposition. Life insurance is not something that we can go and purchase online without having done critical study of your financial needs, your specific risk in life, and specific protection that you need. Once you have done that study, only then would you be able to go and ask the right questions. As it stands, life insurance is still a very pushed product. And that, in a way, challenges us to see how we can make it easy for the customers to understand what the needs are and why the right fit product are produced. And of course, we want to offer the best value for life. We have a four by four strategy, and there have been a lot of forces in the ecosystem that have led into creating this critical strategy. The regulator has also been focusing on two very critical parameters. First, is keep the interest of the customers in the phone. And the second, drive all that you can in terms of having a healthy growth of the industry. Given that life insurance products are pushed products, there is a very high propensity of products getting missold to the customers. And that has been cases where the customers have been told, this is just like a regular fixed deposit product that you can get with this item. Or by the way, you can get much higher returns on so-and-so data. And the committed date could be two or three years down the line. In an industry where attrition is so high, the person who would have missold moves out of the system. And the customer comes back and says, hey, where is my money? And that's a very difficult situation to be in where you want to explain what the features and benefits of the products were. What were the specific terms and conditions that the customer had signed upon. And we are aware that life insurance policy is this thicker contract document. It's very difficult and it is not a correct approach for us to expect that customers would have read through each and every line. And that's a reality. The last thing we want is to lose customers confidence, customers trust. The other fact of life is that life insurance product is not easy to sell. It requires engagement to the customer. It takes quite a number of engagements, discussions to explain to the customer what their needs are. Validate them depending upon their life situations, their aspirations. And then from the stack of the products present the ones which are right fit. The dependency on this interview requires us to pull certain kind of controls from our enterprise out into the domain of sales. This is not just mere sales empowered. It is also to make sure that we do the right thing for our customers. We do the right thing for our distribution partners. And that requires a constant act of balancing. Today we have more than 80 partnerships with banks and non-banking financial services companies. And if you have a relationship with a bank, there is a probability you would have purchased a life insurance product through your relationship manager who would be your trusted advisor, who would engage with you to understand your life needs and present that which is a right mix of the products for you. Now when we talk about agile multi-distribution platform, this is also driving the focus of outreach. As a CFC life, we have around 400 branches and our aspiration is to go deeper into our country. And that is possible only through partnerships. So when we talk about distribution, it's not just from the perspective of sales. It is also taking into account customer services, policy services. How can we empower our channel partners and use their outreach to engage deeply with our customers and meet their requirements at the point of needs and where the customer is? Digital leadership is another very critical facet. And there are multiple experience interpretations of digital. The clear interpretation we follow is that it's a combination of virtual and the physical to attain to the higher standards of customer experience. And engage with the customer right before the customer even realizes that there's a need for that insurance. And that's where our focus is on digital relationship management. That is where the continual engagements will be delivered. And we have quite a lot. Four years back, our engagement was as simple as after the product is sold, you would send your reminders for renewal of your policy. That could be months every year. And we were very proud in saying that, hey, I know the anniversary date of my customer. I know the birthday of my customer. So let me send some SMS and e-mails out. And here's the corollary. There are seven customers who have 15 plus policies with us. Imagine those digital service customers receiving 15 SMSes and 15 e-mails. That says a lot about customer experience. And there are quite a number of other customers who may have migrated, who may have moved over the course of maybe 15 plus years of relationship we may have had. The contact details available of those customers with us in our system of records could be very dated. We may be sending communications to places that customers are not there. And I'm not just talking about cost. I'm talking about customer experience. So that's the interesting challenge about life insurance. How do we improve the frequency of our engagement, the quality of experience, and be relevant on daily basis? The third is, of course, innovation in product selling and growing machines. Around a year and a half back, we came with a specific product on cancer. Again, it is a very difficult conversation. Cancer is on the rise, even in our geography. It's not a subject of discussion only in the West. There are certain misguided information that because in India our life expectancy is not as high as that in West, we don't need to worry about prostate cancer. The cancer is on the rise in our country. And that's another area we are taking a look at. And of course, the fourth strategy pillar is economics of scale. As we start adding more and more partners, as we start increasing our outreach, we do not want to undermine the quality of business. We do not want to undermine the quality of experience. We want to continue to enhance it. Even in contexts where we as HGSE life are not directly in touch with our customers. Either the customers are utilizing one or more of the means for digital relationship management, including our mobile app, or engaging with our distribution channel partners. The bottom four horizontals are the anything pieces, customer experience, technology enablement, risk mitigation and management, and skills development and workforce at hand. I'll briefly touch upon the drivers for the business transformation. We realize that we have evolved as an ecosystem. When we started, we had our group company, HGSE Bank, sourcing more than 90% of our business. And life was pretty good then. The revenue was coming from one very reliable channel partner, and it was all in the family. But then IRDAI, the regulator, decided that that is not necessarily in the interest of the customers. The ecosystem needs to widen up. And that's when the banks need to be given the license to be the brokers, let them sell the right products to the customers, and not the products which are offered by the group companies. Secondly, the earlier model was also hampering the healthy growth of the industry. We had the advantage of having a bank as a part of our group companies. Some of the other members did not have that advantage. And for all those right reasons, the regulator decided and mandated that multi-type is the way to go, in the interest of the customer, in the interest of the healthy growth of the industry. Now that puts us on the fence. We were having a very comfortable life. The revenue that was coming from a very trusted ally, now that ally has a choice, they can go to some other shop and collaborate. Customer experience is another key facet. We talked about exposing our capabilities, moving away from the capabilities that were stuck within our back-office and bringing them in the hands of the touchpoints. And that touchpoint is also a distribution part. Quality of business. In a context where you have B2B to C, modality of engagement, how do you ensure that middle B is sufficiently empowered and the controls are so reliant that you can be sure you have a good quality of business? As life insurers, we make money only when our customers need a healthy and long life. We don't make money otherwise. We become profitable only when the customer meets their needs in terms of protecting themselves against certain risks. And that's why the business of trust is important. So quality of business was another key factor. AMN controls, the anti-money laundering controls, again are there for the right reasons. We have seen quite a number of cases of fraud that were detected post facto. And this is not just a concern on revenue leakages. There are serious concerns of terrorists trying to bring in the illicit funds into the financial system of our country, trying to misappropriate and take advantage from our financial system. That, in a B2B to C context, takes a whole new meaning. The regulatory environment is constantly evolving, much as India is still deeply under-penetrated as a market. There is a lot of potential for new players to come in. There's a lot of potential for niche products to be created and delivered to the market. There's a lot of potential, and we as a fraternity have a lot to do in terms of improving our outreach, going into the deepest part of our country. And that's where a critical opportunity comes our way, though it's a huge challenge. On one facet we have India, the urban India, the rising India, the digital India. On the other hand, we have Ireland, where connectivity is not easy to get. Smartphones, much as they're becoming economical, there's still not a commodity that an individual in the remote test town can afford and can get hands on. The multilingual support is quite limited, not just from the perspective of the manufactured devices, but also from the perspective of being as a fraternity, offering our solutions, which are multilingual. Ineligibility is still shapefully high in our country. And we understand that in our remote test town villages, people easily catch up and understand digits, numbers, numerals. We do not understand English. Multilingual, even if we get that far, we still have the problem of electricity to deal with. So in that ecosystem of opportunity and challenges, how do we position our capabilities and how do we grow them? The supply side context is pretty straightforward. And I'm pretty sure who's ever has been on the solutions and the services side, and the other peers of mine who have been on the energy side have gone through this experience. When you start in absence of enterprise architecture, the view is constrained to project view. Oh, there is a problem. Let's solve it with technology. Oh, there is an opportunity. How can technology help us? And the discussions are limited in terms of those projects and specific objectives of the project. It does not carry the view of the entire organization, let alone the view of the entire ecosystem. The decisions that are taken at the project level, how will it have impact on the empowerment that we plan to achieve a few years back to our distribution partners? What value could have on customer experience? And will be, as an organization, be able to live up to the expectations of the trust that our customers need upon us? There were 30 critical strategic drivers that required us to completely over engineer our IT portfolio. And that, again, was driven through very comprehensive nine-month-long business process re-engineering exercise. We had to take a critical look at our operating model and see what works and what doesn't work. What you see down below are the specific technical levers, the technical architecture, if you will, the building blocks thereof. It includes security, SOAR BPL, enterprise data warehouse, analytics, mobility, portal, cell service, and what happened. All these are first words. Now, we had a good two-month-long debate and I was debating in front of my management. For those of us who have been from the delivery side, understood the risks associated with doing our customer relationship management program, the SOHA BPM, the middleware re-engineering program, the enterprise data warehousing and analytics program, all of them running in parallel. Meeting specific business objectives, aligning these streams of capability development itself was posing a challenge. The obvious approach was, let's take a sequential view of delivering these capabilities. And then the corollary is true. How many good examples we have seen in our industry where people have delivered first the customer relationship management, then they tried to deliver SOHA BPM, and then they went back and re-did the entire CRM capability development. And we said that the risk was taken. My team spent good 12 hours a day, 16 hours a day for good two to three years to make this transformation happen. It was a very character building exercise as well, if you will, and that's something that we will go through. The other critical facet is information security. Given that we operate in B2B context, how do we make sure that when the capabilities are exposed to our partners who have very different levels of maturity and investment profile, as far as information security is concerned, that the capabilities get delivered in their true spirit in the way we expect them to be delivered, in the way we expect them to be utilized, in the way we expect them to be measured. And that was covering the whole gamut of risk that came in this program. The first step we did is go out and see what specific frameworks are required. Needless to mention, none of this would be possible without having a very formally institutionalized enterprise architecture as a practice. And that's where TOGAF came as a trusted client. We started from our organization strategy and took a very formal top-down approach, engaged with our executives, engaged with our operations team, engaged with our sales, engaged with our line managers, engaged with our customers, engaged with our B2B partners, engaged with our branch operations to understand what is the daily life of each of these users. Even when the entire exercise of business process re-engineering started, even within the runs of business architecture, we had confidence. The job of sales is very simple. Keep the conversation short with the customer, get the kind of check, move it to the branch operations, log in the business. Then it is the job of the operations to take the entire case, the proposal, all the way through. So if the turnaround time is violated, if the policy document reaches in the hands of the customer, beyond a threshold, whose fault it is, it was assumed to be that of operations. It doesn't really work that way in real life. The operation says, oh, the sales guy did all that the guy was expected to do, but the income proof document did not come through in time. The customer was asked to get the medicals done. The customer was not picking up the phone to give them the appointment. So why should I be irresponsible? And those are the nature of conflicts we have to deal with. The very first step we took is to organize all those areas of concern, all those target focus areas into a very organized structure. And that's why this cultural organization took shape. And we organized more than 90 capabilities in this building process. This is an easy exercise from the tech architecture perspective. We have read all the advisory reports to say, hey, you have this type of problem, I have this type of solution. And as architects, we are tempted to pull those cards out from a back pocket to say that there is a solution to every problem that we have. And there's a tendency to fit every solution to every problem that we have. And I'm going to touch upon those aspects somewhere later on. But these were some of the critical building blocks from our tech architecture perspective. Togaz came as a trusted guy. The architecture contact framework, the architecture capability framework helped us institutionalize architecture as a practice. I'm going to dwell a little deeper into the lessons learned in terms of what it took to take the organization down this path of building and institutionalizing the enterprise architecture practice. But this is a fun part. This is a reason why we are where we are. It has taken years of endurance. Some of these lessons learned sound very, very intuitive. And I'm just going to quickly go through them in the interest of time. Discipline is not visible. Outcome is. Too often we get carried away as enterprise architects. That, hey, if I use this discipline, if I just educate my top management that this is what I'm trying to do, these are the fancy blueprints that I'm going to create. And if we do this low behold, everything will be okay. And that is required. Don't get me wrong. Discipline is a very significant part of driving in a transformation. But if you don't have relentless, merciless focus on the outcomes expected and you're not able to trace each of the capabilities developed, delivered, consumed and measured through those measurable outcomes, people are going to lose interest. There's a saying, at least in the fraternity that I've engaged with, in India, three things really work. First is what the prominent advisors say. I'm not going to name the names because it's a very vendor neutral platform that I'm deciding upon. But then there are advisory organizations who will say that 9000 CIOs across 138 countries are doing this. Where are you? And that puts us in the spotlight. Where are we? The second piece is our public ecosystem, the delivery ecosystem. Oh, fantastic. This give and release makes sense. This platform's tools technology makes sense. Can my partner deliver it? Because in India, especially in life insurance industry, we are heavily dependent upon our system integration partners, the OEM partners, to help us realize those capabilities. But when you do this enterprise architecture, institutionalization, which of these areas, which of these controls, you want to let go? And this is a very crucial conversation in the context of transformation. Believe me, your partners are going to come back and sit across the table and say, if you want me to drive success for this transformation, you need to yield control. And that's a very crucial conversation to have. Lower your culture, easier said than done. And this particular term for culture needs to be decomposed, needs to be assimilated. What really excites your leadership team? What really excites your sponsors? What really excites the operations team, the line manager, the people on the ground? That is your culture. If you're not able to provoke that thought process, if you're not able to engage with those team members and colleagues, and this is where I recollect the living example that we saw in Mahatma Gandhi. He was invited after his trip from South Africa to come and present in the National Congress event. And he said that until you go to the deepest pocket of this country, tall with the farmers, shoulder to shoulder, sweat under the sun, there's no way they're going to trust you. And that is very key even for enterprise architecture. Unless you empathize, right from top management, all the way down to the people whose lives you're going to influence. Not just the disciplines and the controls and the deliverables and the blueprints and the outcomes that you're going to have post-execution. In order for those things to be relevant, you have to be recognized as a trusted advisor, as a trusted execution partner in the business. Lower your environment. What impact it's going to create on a given very certain individual? This is my personal favorite. This is where I have stayed awake for most nights. Oh, this is the right thing to do. Why am I being pressurized to make trade-offs? Because in architecture, trade-off means transition state one, two, three, and what have you. Your tackle keeps growing and growing and growing. But there are certain trade-offs which you have to face in the larger interest of the organization. Capacity and commitment. On these three levels, enterprise architecture best. We want to be very careful in terms of how to instrument these levers. How do we communicate in terms of what can be delivered and what cannot be delivered? At what level of quality and maturity do you want to deliver those capabilities? Commitment is an area where you're going to put your credentials on the line. And that's where execution comes into importance, into significance. From the capacity perspective, in India at least we have a fantastic ecosystem where we can travel. Very recently, which was an eye-opener for me, we did a very first hackathon in the life insurance industry. The amount of enthusiasm and energy we saw in the young brains and in young minds, or simply mind work. So capacity should not be constrained given the new formats of intelligent discovery which are coming our way. Business evolves so does enterprise architecture, or rather so should enterprise architecture. Your operating model is not going to remain the same. And as enterprise architects, we cannot hide behind this veil saying that, hey, I had done all that I could, it took me time to deliver. But if your operating model, Mr. Business keeps shaking or keeps evolving, I'm not going to be able to meet those commitments. Guess what? That argument is not going to pull through. Agility is the need of the art. With digital idea of taking shape, digitalization, driving the way we engage with our partners, the speed with which we have to evolve has to be intended with the demands of the ecosystem. This one, again, learned the very hard way. There's a colleague of mine who handles all that I do post-production. And I made all the endeavors I could to make him my best friend because that's where I could take a scorecard, I define my scorecard. If that person is not able to live on time, I'm not done my job. If that stakeholder is not able to give commitment to the business that the systems are going to be 99.99% up, the performance is going to be less than three seconds. You will not have any information lost in transit. You will not have any external malicious forces compromise on the integrity of the data. Well, all those are commitments that the operations team makes to the business. And look at the scenario, who is going to be relying on? It's going to be the art that you think. Collaboration is key to excellence. And this is where the entire capability framework for TOGAP comes into picture and the software side thereof. It's very easy for us to define governance as policing. That's not going to cut it in an extended enterprise where you engage with your partners. Collaboration requires you to toil in the sun. Collaboration requires you to understand and assimilate the type of impact, the nature of issues that your customers, your partners, your business stakeholders are going through. And that requires internal instrumentation of some of the capabilities that you have delivered. So governance is not equal to policing. Just because from the architecture capability framework, you have put in place the governance levers, the controls, doesn't mean that you have done your job. Those have to be understood in reality in terms of how it yields benefits to the people whom we are requesting to align. This is pretty key. Have a very clearly defined objective, why you want to do what you want to do, under the guise of enterprise content framework and the architecture capability framework. Service to do is key to advocacy. And that goes back to the very first point that we talked about, where discipline is not visible, the outcome is. As architecture practice, we are here to serve our community of stakeholders. We're not here to dictate. This is an easy one. No need to explain that. But in the West, there is a very famous term which is called ivory tower architects. And it's very difficult to get blinded behind the sheer pile of documentation and do things to say that I'm doing my job. Question is, is it delivering the value that you were intended to achieve? The second life's point is my personal favorite. This is again kept me awake for many nights. And this is the fact of life for many amuse organizations. Shadow ITs are emerging. It goes back to the point about capability, capacity and commitment. As IT departments, you will not have endless capacity, endless budget or even critical experience due to experimentation alongside your business stakeholders. And that's an area that you need to understand what specific elements of your charter you want to let go for some time. That's what shadow IT is all about. Could you skip this and go back to the couple of slides in terms of the road ahead. From the bottom to the top is how our capabilities are done. We started thinking in terms of the PPR and the specific business capabilities we want to roll out, specific IT levers that we need to roll out in the tech architecture, the app architecture and of course the information architecture. And we started going up and up. We delivered new capabilities called pre-approved from a short state through processing. The idea was to cut the time it takes for the sales or the customer to fill a proposal form which is really my cover. Right now it requires more than 140 plus pieces of information to be obtained from the customer, fed into a proposal form and then pushed for the downstream processing. How can we cut that 140 to say 10 and 15 without necessarily undermining the quality of business? And then we have some of the controls called pre-conversion verification check. How do we ensure that much as the sales is engaging with the customers that the quality of business is good? We understand the needs of the customer right. This is where analytics comes into picture. This is where analytics through data from sources of insight outside the enterprise comes into picture. We have already started robotic process automation, cognitive computing. And I'm very pleased to say that in the last three months as life insurance strategy, nine life insurance have come together to set up an informal IT consortium to align to some of the regulatory mandates in terms of putting the customer interest first and driving the heavy growth of the industry. Thank you.