8January 2016Information ManagementYou Can't Solve a Problem You Aren't Sure You Have!!By Sebastian Pariath, COO & CIO, John HancockCustomer Centricity, knowing your customer, customer intimacy and proactive customer management are strategies that continue to carry the day across all industries. The Financial Services Industry is undergoing a dramatic transformation due to changes in customer service expectations and the digitization of services in general.The need to digitize the customer experience has meant that traditional companies like ours have the need to integrate disparate distribution channels, capture the entire customer life cycle, increase customer loyalty through differentiated experiences and in general meet customer expectations that have been set by other traditional retail customer focused organizations. A lack of focus on information management as a discipline and a cultural focus on products has traditionally made it difficult to achieve these objectives. Financial Services and specifically Insurance organizations are even more challenged due to the years and years of evolution of their physical data and application environments.Over the course of decades, these environments moved and morphed through periods of different technologies, business strategies, and acquisitions. The current data environment can be one of the bigger obstacles to executing customer centric strategies and in many cases it is a problem that is not fully understood nor appreciated. What is needed is an Information Management Strategy that defines an organization's approach to understand and manage its data as an asset. As with all new things, we sometimes lose sight of the really critical items when trying to enable new and emerging technologies and practices, and our journey in maturing the Information Management practice at John Hancock is no exception. More than three years ago our company went through a reorganization with the objective of increasing the degree of scale utilization across its various businesses. This reorganization drove a number of changes, not the least of which was the creation of a divisional responsibility for operations across all of our businesses. The intent of this change was to ensure that the Company as a whole was taking advantage of opportunities for leveraging like functions, while ensuring that core/unique business functions remained closely aligned with the business priorities of the unit. A somewhat less obvious drive for consistency emerged on the approach to Information Management. The organization as whole had defined goals around customer centricity and quickly realized that in order to achieve those goals a more consistent approach to understanding, managing and utilizing customer data was needed. In looking at how to meet this need and of course discussing with multiple external experts and advisors, it was clear that there was no formalized Information Management Strategy (IMS).The initial reaction to this finding was somewhat mixed. Nevertheless, the Customer Centricity objective continued to drive the company forward and the adoption of Master Data Management technology to enable customer data aggregation generated enough questions around ownership, governance and architecture that the IMS skeptics were defeated and an Information Management Strategy was developed.The strategy comprised many components (architecture, governances, quality, business intelligence, operating model), and only pieces of it were fully understood. Each area had resident experts and when information was needed those experts were asked to provide answers. As we looked to aggregate data Sebastian PariathIn My Opinion
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