Business Case Study: Technical Underwriting Financial System

Technical Underwriting Financial System

Business world was changed forever because of the introduction of computers. Businesses use information technology (IT) through computers and software to ensure that their departments are running smoothly. IT can be used in a number of different departments including resources, finances, security, and many others. IT can be a great tool for business if used in right directions which can bring great benefits to the business at the same point if used wrongly can have adverse effects too. An organization called Northern Insurance Company invested few millions budget to implement Technical Underwriting Finance System (TUFS) to replace the traditional underwriting process. The two years long project was

It also shows that the business participation of different departments was not adequate during the development and implementation stages. A project shall be successful only if there is an equal participation between business and IT department. As all the IT projects originate to solve business problem or to improve business according to market demand, the alignment between business and IT departments is a necessity. The function of IT in every business is to capture, process, distribute and store information or data, to do so the first principle of aligning IT with the business is to clearly understand the business itself. For IT department to function properly the business groups should provide business requirement documents with inputs to inform about the business processes and what are their expectation on the project, which in this case was missing. In every project, stakeholder participation is very important because they are the people or team who are influenced by the outcome of the project. While planning the strategy, a project team should understand the requirements of each stakeholder. As this project was to streamline the underwriting process, the underwriters are key stakeholders and understanding their requirement was a must. However, lack of participation between the stakeholders and project team led this project to go in wrong direction. To prevent these problems

In this case, the system was implemented but the business was not using the system, instead underwriters were following the traditional process. And the root cause of the problem was that there was no alignment between business and IT. Without both team working together for the common goals, it is impossible for the system to be successful.

According to Martin acknowledgement, TUFS system has some issues and IT teams are waiting for underwriters inputs to fix it. If underwriters put forward their inputs about the system, the majority of problem can be fixed. Due to limited time for the project, IT teams had to defer some of the functionality in TUFS as per senior management’s decision which was communicated with everyone. The deferred functionality needs to be included in the system so that TUFS can run complete business processes in the