Oracle in Insurance

By the close of 2009 Oracle had acquired 56 companies--30 of which filled out Oracle's applications portfolio, and 26 of which spruced up its technology lines of business. As Oracle’s marketing team points out 100 of Fortune 100 uses Oracle and in Insurance 20 out of Top 20 uses Oracle Applications.
The strategy has given Oracle broader market leverage with a full stack of Technologies and also the domain specific offerings.

How does it matter to Insurance?

It has been over a year since Oracle created a separate global business unit focusing on the Insurance industry. It has provided some sense of how Oracle wants to integrate the acquired assets and the future direction – at least on the paper. Oracle has a full set of product servicing Insurance, starting from a Policy Admin system, Claims system, Rating, Financial/Billing, CRM, document generation, Data warehousing, Reporting to name a few. It also has a complete set of middleware technologies – thanks to BEA and Sun.
Oracle is already showing results. It has closed many deals with likes of Marsh and Farmers to set the tone for the coming year.

My take – I think, Oracle is serious contender in the Insurance industry. It's industry focus is a BIG PLUS.
It will be of advantage to mid-size insurance companies to be an 'Oracle Shop' and leverage synergies and volume discounts. Also, as Oracle has presence in almost every big organization, it will definitely penetrate more into many of those. I think, it’s time to stop ridiculing the Oracle for their aggressive acquisition strategy and start paying attention to how it can be leveraged.

- Amit Unde

Data Dispensers - Interesting !

Coca-cola has come up with RFID based drink dispensers, which will give consumers choices of more than 100 beverages.. ! It will also allow experimenting by sending new drink formulaes to these machines..
It is not just drink dispenser, but also a data dispenser. It will collect the data of what customers are drinking and transmit it over night to its datawarehouse. The company will get valuable first-hand information on how new drinks are fairing in the market, the regional taste preference and also help managing inventory efficiently.

I loved the concept.I think, it is applicable everywhere - making 'Point of sales' to dispense quality near real-time data will vastly improve the business intelligence. No middlemen, no corruption of data !

Cut your losses !

I have been working with customers to help them modernize their IT systems for few years now. I have seen that customers are more receptive, if we prescribe to build over the existing systems rather than rebuilding from scratch. Though it is comforting to see optimal reuse of existing, practically, sometimes it makes better sense to rewrite than reuse, especially if the current systems are architected in a fashion that will hinder achieving the desired target state for the business. Most often, it is a psychological block that makes it difficult to move away from something that we have cared for a long time. It is like an affinity of share pundit to his or her loosing stock. They buy every time stocks go below and average out its price, but they end up losing everything at the end. It sometimes makes sense to cut your losses and invest somewhere else that is likely to give you most returns.

Success secrets of Portfolio Management

Yesterday, I had an opportunity to talk with divisional CIOs of a large consulting firm about my experiences of implementing portfolio management and CIO dashboards. One question from them kind of intrigued me – What it the success secret of portfolio management? Is it a process, tool or people?
I reflected on my previous experiences and stories that I have heard from my colleagues. Many large organizations put in millions of dollars in setting up Portfolio management tool, only to abandon it later for want of value. Almost in every case, the root cause is – lack of quality data and inability to keep up with changes in the data. Garbage in, Garbage out !
So what could be secret for the success? I think, it is simplicity of the solution. Strive for it without compromising the analysis value. More often, the portfolio management exercise often starts with selection of a tool and implementation of that tool. The tool is often comprehensive and offers to capture a whole lot of data and provides numerous reports. The question one should ask – is it worth the value? The first time, you can capture the data, but can you keep with the changes in the data? IMHO, the first step should be to decide what you must see every day, every quarter and during your annual budget exercise. Keep it as simple as possible. Develop a data capture process, simpler tools and governance process around it. Try to integrate tools to your operational systems so as to keep the data entry minimum. For example, get the operational FTE cost by integrating your tools with timesheet systems. Enhance your process and tools over the period in agile way as you start using it.
After a year or so, once you are confident of the captured data and the process, you may want to look at professional portfolio management tools that can act as your repository. That is solely to keep your future maintenance costs minimum and get in-built integration capabilities. It may appear reversed approach as you will need to migrate data to the tools, but trust me, if you know what you want from tools, often it will be simpler exercise to select, setup and maintain tools. Otherwise, tools are sure to overwhelm you and set you in undesired direction.

In the eye of the storm

Great interview with Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit at Knowledge@Wharton - http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2068

Vikram explains the root cause of financial crisis and his solution - going back to basics of banking. He has a great advise for leader wannabes .. A must read.

Open source within your organization

I recently made a trip over the seas in order to rescue a very critical project out of missing deadline syndrome. The project timelines were very aggressive with many parallel work streams. When I was involved remotely, I could not figure out why a bunch of sharp developers can not deliver as agreed. More painful was not able to estimate correctly for the remaining work and commit to next deadline. When I sat down face to face and talked, I discovered a shocking truth - people are wasting most of the time in waiting on each other. There were defined custodians of different parts (or services if you may) and almost everybody was dependent on each other. The problem was everybody was too busy with their own priorities and not able to get the time to help out others. To fill the waiting time, they did stubs and mocks, but it all contributed to the wastage.

I read recent blog entry by Martin Flower - http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/ServiceCustodian.html and I think it is very interesting solution to such problems. He proposes to adopt the 'Open source' strategy within the organization. Rather than waiting on custodians to enhance or fix their services, go ahead and change the code as per your requirements. Send the patch to custodian who will review and merge with the main code. It is always easier to review and merge, rather than code and test. Now, I am aware that it is not as easy as it sounds, otherwise, there would have not been any need of custodians. However, if it works for open source world, it should sure work within your own organization. I guess, it depends on maturity of the existing code and developers as well. It may be possible after the initial versions of services are released. It is MUST that you have a mechanism for knowledge sharing and collaboration, otherwise, no other option than waiting on others.

Google Chrome - Loved it !

Just downloaded and played with google chrome.

The speed is impressive, so are cool features of showing history with timestamps and ability to search through the history. How many times we need to go back to the link that we had crossed on our way, but not able to find again !

I liked 'most visited' on the homepage. Great feature to quickly launch your everyday sites. It is like browser determining your favourites rather than you having to specifically mention it.

Incognito mode will be handy on shared machines.

There are some glitches as well - most irritating being 'favorites'. It is so complicated to add any link to favorites and manage it.

I am not sure if it can be real threat to IE. Most of the audience that get benefited or excited by such features is probably already on FireFox and rest (like me) probably hate change !