Ahead in the Cloud: Bringing Agility to an Insurance Business in Japan with Drew Flynn

Chad Watt: Welcome to Ahead In The Cloud, where business leaders share what they've learned on their cloud journey. I'm Chad Watt, Infosys Knowledge Institute researcher and writer, here today with Drew Flynn, Chief Technology Officer at NN Life Insurance Japan. NN Life Japan delivers corporate owned life insurance to more than 100,000 small and mid-size businesses in Japan. Drew has served as Project Manager, Head of Project Management Office, Transformation Officer, and earlier this year was promoted to CTO.

So, is it fair to say your job is now all of the above, Drew?

Drew Flynn: Hello Chad, great to be with you. Yes, as the CTO, I wear many hats, including all of the ones that you've mentioned, but a lot more. I guess I'm very lucky, I have many talented people who work for me, who take care of those items day to day.

Chad Watt: Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get started in technology?

Drew Flynn: I was born in the early seventies, so I grew up in a world where new technology, particularly computers, were being released regularly. So like many, I enjoyed playing games on these new technologies, then started to use them for more than gaming after getting into university. And I was actually studying geology at the time, but quickly saw a more attractive career path in technology, especially as this was early to mid nineties and everybody was talking about y2k.

Chad Watt: Y2k. I'd love to explain that to the young people someday. Definite flashback. Speaking of flashbacks, what was your first computer, and I'm going to add to this, what was your first game?

Drew Flynn: My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. That was so long ago, I don't remember too many games from that, but the next one was a Commodore 64, and on that one we played Summer Games and Winter Games. They were a lot of fun, getting friends around and enjoying those Olympic Games on some. Really fun.

Chad Watt: I think I may have to challenge you to a rematch in the relay later.

Drew Flynn: Yes.

Chad Watt: Break a keyboard or two.

Let's fast forward a few years. When did you start working with modern enterprise cloud systems?

Drew Flynn: Well, it was around 2016. We started looking seriously at the cloud technologies that were out there, as you are AWS, Bluemix. And so that's probably when we got started, around 2016.

Chad Watt: What was your impression of that and the changing from kind of the on-prem server closet model?

Drew Flynn: I think, to my first impression, I liked the promise of the cloud native solutions, the speed and agility, the simplified infrastructure management, the improved security and reliability, and of course reduced cost. All of those led to a fairly favorable impression for me, and also the team in technology at Japan at the time.

Chad Watt: And now today, NN Life Japan is in the middle of a full cloud driven transformation. Tell us a little bit more about the catalyst that led up to that.

Drew Flynn: Well, there were two catalysts that got us onto the path of the cloud. So as you know, we're part of a greater NN group, and the group, CIO at the time, implemented a cloud first strategy that is still current to this day. The second was our own internal transformation to a more agile way of working. So we focused on three key areas, people, processes, and platforms. And realized early on we would need new platforms that could allow technology to meet the speed of the business. So the infrastructure we had that time was not cutting it. It took too long to provision the servers, we had complicated processes and realistically limited features and functions. The cloud promised to solve these issues and provide improved speed and reliability.

Chad Watt: So is cloud replacing one platform or several platforms for you?

Drew Flynn: The overall different cloud solutions that we have are replacing several platforms. For example, we brought in Salesforce Saas to replace Siebel, and then obviously we brought in Azure to replace the old private on premise solution we had at the time.

Chad Watt: So how far along are you on this journey? Are you guys starting out, early stage, mid process, mostly done?

Drew Flynn: At the moment we're sort of mid-process, we're coming to the end of the first large migration off the metal boxes onto the cloud. After that, we're probably going to have to do a bit more rework over the next year or two to move to more cloud native solutions like Saas or PaaS.

Chad Watt: So talk to me about the implementation journey, that kind of "how" of this work.

Drew Flynn: Well, the first few years of the implementation were actually quite tough. We attempted to do it ourselves, and we just didn't have the internal knowledge or capabilities to drive that implementation successfully. We had to hire and train staff, but as you know, that takes time. But recently, as our internal staff became more capable on the platform and we received some external support from some key partners like Infosys, the implementation has accelerated, especially in the last year.

Chad Watt: Do you guys use Agile?

Drew Flynn: We definitely use Agile, although we say it's more be Agile than do Agile. We definitely started moving in conjunction with the move to the cloud, as I said before, around people, processes and platforms. The process side of that was moving from an older waterfall technique of change management, change methodologies, to an Agile implementation. Around the same time, around 2017, we started to do that.

Chad Watt: So if I want to learn from your Agile and I showed up at your office, I said, Drew, I need all your Agile details. Would that be useful to me?

Drew Flynn: Well, the first thing I would tell you is that every organization's journey is different. So I would say you cannot copy what we did exactly and expect the same results. We internally like to use the words "inspired by a lot" when we talk about how we implemented our Agile way of working.

So we were inspired by what other people had done, we were inspired by books that we read, videos that we watched, podcasts that we listened to, and that's because I think every organization's starting point is different, so every organization's journey will be different. My recommendation would be for you if you wanted to do it and you start small and iterate learning as you go, and then you need to see what works and what is accepted by your management and staff in your own organization.

Chad Watt: I've heard that some businesses in Japan have been reticent to move to cloud. I was striking to kind of learn these things about how business culture matches with technology and the state of technology, and the way ideas are shared and spread. So you're in Japan and you're digitizing a culture that still very much values tangible contracts, and very much so in a field such as life insurance. Tell us about Hanko and how you make room for that tradition in a cloud based, agile driven business process.

Drew Flynn: Good question. The reality is, Japan is still very much a paper based society, and how customers of the SME, small to medium enterprises of Japan, and they use what we call, generally over here the business practices to use are Hanko. The Hanko is like a signature in the west, it's used for signing all sorts of contracts from life insurance policies to accepting home deliveries. So it's like a little stamper, a seal that we put onto paper contracts.

And for our business, we've started using digital applications for some product lines while also keeping the capability to receive, manage and transact paper contracts. It's slow, very slow to move to the digital application, because we do have the culture here. It's slowly changing, however, just to let you know, I myself still have a fax machine sitting here beside me. We don't use it often, but every now and then we still use a fax.

Chad Watt: Wow. It's, Hey, you've got to serve the customer, beat the customer where the customer is.

Drew Flynn: Exactly.

Chad Watt: So we've been talking kind of transformation, and I wanted to take a look at data and AI. This is an area that's of growing importance in digital companies, companies that are working to modernize and get ahead in competition. When you think about data and AI, how does an AI practitioner, or a company that's getting into artificial intelligence, really build trust in the outcomes that they produce?

Drew Flynn: Well, we've been asking ourselves the same question. I think the first step is to educate executives and senior leaders with at least the basics of AI. How does it work? What are the potential limitations? After that, in locally NN, we have taken the same approach that we had with our Agile implementation. You start small and iterate. You have several use cases bubbling away and you see what outcomes, what insights AI can provide out of those use cases. So really, start small and learn as you go.

Chad Watt: Got it. Who are you bringing into those discussions? Is it a technology department or is it beyond that?

Drew Flynn: It's beyond that. Of course, data scientists, data and machine learning engineers, but really you have to have the relevant business users. So we have the relevant business users for the different streams, sales operations involved. And I think what we learned was the first thing you need to do is, and it's really important to do this, is to understand what the business is trying to achieve with the AI model. What do they want to get out of it? What question or problem are they trying to solve? And then you build your models around that.

Chad Watt: It's something that's become so popular, but I think the trouble with something that becomes popular, sometimes people forget that critical step. How do you frame the problem? What is this tool in our toolbox actually here for? That's a great, great point.

So life insurance, you deal in a lot of data. I'm sure you have some pretty robust data processes. When you have a company that has good data processes, that's really easy to produce a lot of reports on that data, how do you make sure you're producing the right reports and avoiding what I call dashboard fatigue?

Drew Flynn: Dashboard fatigue, I think that's a great name for it. We do have plenty of dashboards over here. As to how to reduce dashboard fatigue, I think one way I would suggest is you've got to understand how your users are utilizing those reports. When have they stopped paying attention to your reports? When are they engaging with the reports? When are they not engaging with those reports? And if you have that data, at least you could better adapt your reporting to be more relevant for the users' needs.

And I think the other thing is you need to have sort of a housekeeping model that the reports that are no longer needed, it's always good to remove them out of the cycle or change them and adapt them so that they're relevant to the business needs again.

Chad Watt: That's really something, because the process becomes a mission and then if no one's reading it then why is it being created in the first place?

Drew Flynn: Exactly.

Chad Watt: Let's talk now about cyber security. You are shifting to the cloud. How has your shift to cloud changed your approach to security and cyber security?

Drew Flynn: We wouldn't say it's changed the approach too much. Just the way that we work and being part of a broader group, we have quite robust approaches to cyber security. But what I will say is it's made us invest more in our security team, so expanded with staff that have cloud experience. We implemented MFA across all applications as well as providing more education to our users on the existing threats and cyber safety protocols of these new platforms.

Chad Watt: Related to this, we are kind of on the back edge of a pandemic here that shifted the traditional workplace to a work from home or a work from wherever. We kind of scrambled and made it work. And the shift was kind of done quickly and a little bit of a crisis mode. Did you see an impact on cybersecurity standards or practices in that period?

Drew Flynn: Yeah, I think with the shift to remote work from a security point of view, more responsibility shifted onto the individual employees. They're no longer in the office, they're at home. You have various environments that they're in with wifi or ethernet cable, there's different devices around. So I think the standards around awareness and education needed to take this into account. So we needed to ensure that our staff understood maybe some of the challenges, some of the pitfalls of working from home and how to address that to ensure that you're safe when you're accessing via a laptop through a VPN. So definitely more around education and awareness.

Chad Watt: So now that we're coming through this, have you guys made some permanent changes in your outlook on work from home and your tech stack and how you address and be more methodical about ensuring that we're as safe at home as we are in the office?

Drew Flynn: The first thing I'd say is I truly believe that hybrid remote work, it's not going away. This is the new normal, and we definitely need to adapt and ensure that we're secure for the long term. We're still going through the motions, making sure that we have the right applications, the right systems, the right appliances to ensure that our staff are safe, whether they're accessing from home or in the office, or maybe in a coffee shop, or on a work-cation where they spend a week on the beach and a week working from the hotel on the beach. So we need to make sure that whatever environment they're connecting from, that we have the security in place to ensure that it's safe.

Chad Watt: So it's not going away?

Drew Flynn: Yeah, it's not going away. That's something that will be with us for a long, long time as we see this new hybrid remote work becoming the norm.

Chad Watt: Let's talk a little bit back on the customers. Tell me what difference this cloud transformation, NN Life Japan is going through, has made thus far for your customers and businesses?

Drew Flynn: I think simply put, we've become more speedy and reliable. Using cloud platforms has allowed us to solve customer problems in a faster and more innovative way. So for example, we can easily scale compute resources when the business requires it, we can run AB testing simply using cloud solutions. And especially for Japan, we have a more robust infrastructure in case of natural disaster. You may know, Japan has a lot of natural disasters, typhoons, earthquakes. So it's really important for us to have a very strong robust infrastructure in case something happens.

Chad Watt: Oh wow, I hadn't thought about it from that perspective. Is there a seasonality to the work outside of the natural disasters?

Drew Flynn: So, the end of March, we have the peak contracting period for the year, so we can scale up the systems there. Similarly, we see another peak in September is the peak for our actual cycle, the business cycle we have here. So leveraging cloud there to spin up more systems or more compute resources when required, helps us a lot.

Chad Watt: So you've got to manage change management, you've got to manage technical changes. How do you keep those squarely focused on customer experience in the bottom line?

Drew Flynn: I think what we've done is shifted the mindset a bit for IT mindset to an IT for business mindset, meaning we frame all technology investments in terms of what customer or business problem are we solving. As I was mentioning before, solving the customer or business problems. So this allows us to articulate clear benefits for our business and it makes my conversations with my CFO go a lot easier when I present it in that way.

Chad Watt: Given your new capabilities and your new flexibility on the technical side, tell me about a time when the technology guys help the business guys get better at doing their business.

Drew Flynn: Well, I think some of the ways we've seen that is in the engagement that we have with our distribution channel, so we have marketing representatives who engage with our independent agents. We have insurance agents that sell our products, so it's the independent agent distribution channel. And with technology moving to cloud-based platforms like Salesforce, we were able to move away from a lot of paper-based solutioning. Marketing representatives would bring paper out there, and when we started to look at the technologies that were available a few years ago, and this is going back quite a few years, but looking at, for example, iPads, bringing iPads into the marketing representatives tool set and having them be able to display in real time for their independent agents, that changes in the products that we were using, looking at different scenarios for different types of customers, male, female, smoker, non-smoker.

The technology itself was available and we shared that with the business and said, Hey, how about you use this to engage with your customers, the distribution channel for NN Life Japan. And that really helped a lot with iPads, iPhones, and the tooling, the solutions that we put on, they were using Salesforce at the time.

Chad Watt: That's a great way to bring home the benefit of the changes that you're putting in place.

Drew Flynn: And it helped us reduce paper, so managed to become a little bit more digital.

Chad Watt: Creating a little virtuous cycle for yourself there.

Drew Flynn: Yes.

Chad Watt: Good. All right, Drew, thanks so much for your time. This has been a good talk. I got a couple more follow up, quick questions for you.

Drew, do you have enough life insurance?

Drew Flynn: Yes, I have some, but my wife may say not enough.

Chad Watt: Are you backing up all your personal devices to the cloud?

Drew Flynn: Yes, majority of them. Look, I'm an Australian living in Japan, and I use cloud to store and share photos and videos of families and friends in Australia and around the world. So from a convenience point of view, yes, I do that.

Chad Watt: Thank you, Drew, very much for your time and your insights.

Drew Flynn: Thank you, Chad. And thank you for having me.

Chad Watt: This podcast is part of our collaboration with MIT Tech Review, in partnership with Infosys Cobalt. Visit our content hub at technologyreview.com to learn more about how businesses across the globe are moving from cloud chaos to cloud clarity.

Be sure to follow Ahead In The Cloud wherever you get your podcast. You can find more details in our show notes and transcripts at Infosys.com/iki in our podcast section. Thanks to our producers, Catherine Burdette, Christine Calhoun and Yulia De Bari. I'm Chad Watt with the Infosys Knowledge Institute. Until next time, keep learning and keep sharing.