Managing legacy change: FBD Insurance CTO Enda Kyne on restoring IT control

'We centralised everything internally and started to get the practices right, from requirements through to development standards'

Enda Kyne is a busy man. Saddled with a historic legacy IT set up, employee unrest manifested in higher than average IT staff turnover, and with the IT department the centre of attention for all the wrong reasons, he arrived as CTO/COO at Ireland's FBD Insurance three years ago determined to make some changes.

"IT's brand really was quite low and it was struggling to make a positive impact," he told Computing at the Nutanix .NEXT event in Copenhagen this month.

The root cause of the malaise was a significant IT transformation that was started in late 2012 and is nearing its final delivery. The intent of this large lift-and-shift upgrade was to allow FBD to use technology to leapfrog much larger global insurance competitors, but the transformation struggled and it was run by a mixture of some internal staff and a lot of external suppliers.

"The whole idea of using tech to grow business capability in those early days took a knock back. We were struggling to deliver impactful benefits, and we had lots of third parties involved. So, with the backing of leadership colleagues and the FBD board we made the decision to centralise everything internally and started to get the practices right, from requirements right through to development standards."

Slowly to the cloud

Currently, the firm's main systems are largely on-premises and will likely remain there for the immediate future, given the risk-averse nature of the regulated industry. The systems in question include the main policy administration system and customer interaction software.

There's a move to hybrid cloud, though, in the shape of CRM on Azure, some data analytics applications with IBM on private cloud, Cisco in the cloud with BT, learning management and expenses systems on private cloud, and Kyne recently signed a deal to move HR to SAP in the cloud. Importantly, the company has broken the ice in its use of Dynamics CRM. That significant psychological hurdle cleared, Kyne says cloud should get more of a hearing in the future. In the meantime, early in 2020 end users will be moving to Office 365.

FBD's IT team is staffed by 160 internal engineers plus 40 from service provider BT Ireland. The prevailing approach has been one of large lift-and-shift projects and as a result it just takes a long time to get things done, Kyne said.

"Things can appear slow on the surface, and as a result I invest a lot of time explaining to business stakeholders why we prioritise projects the way we do," Kyne explained.

"We aspire to be more fleet-of-foot. We're there as a partner and we need to be at the leadership table making change happen, both in a technical sense and also helping to drive business change."

The perceived lack of momentum has at times engendered a culture of 'IT says no'. "We can be so absorbed with this legacy-to-new move that it allows little time and energy to be more flexible," Kyne said.

"My ideology is to get ahead of the business, so we can think ahead of our external customers and our internal customers, and figure out what's going to be good for them because they don't always get the time or head space to think ahead, especially in terms of technical solutions."

Beer before, not beer after

The root cause of FBDs challenge, Kyne believes, is his predecessors being too trusting of the solution salespeople and too reluctant to test the assertions of consultants. This behaviour, he says, is a big part of why a multi-million euro insurance software deal failed to deliver on time.

To avoid repeating these mistakes, his team invests time to complete a thorough solution and price checking regime, a system of like-for-like comparisons and a review of supplier relations "in a positive partnership way, so they're now seeing the opportunity."

Kyne insists on a ‘beer before not beer after' approach. In other words, rather than toasting the signing of a contract, the team should spend a lot of time getting to know the vendors, socialising with them and their competitors and asking lots of pertinent questions. "Get the knowledge upfront."

There's also a concept called Jeremy Clarkson mode: "Whatever we get it doesn't have to go back in one piece". The Clarkson concept was applied to a Nutanix appliance bought in last year to test the merits of hyperconvergence for the policy administration system which was up for renewal.

"So, we said we're going to try our best to break it, to catch it out. We tested it physically by placing the equipment in very hot rooms, ran it flat out for three to four days at a time. We tested different cables in different slots, and we tried placing software on the device that would cause it some problems. I said let's have some fun with this and break down the barriers about what's there, and they found literally nothing to concern them."

Moreover, the appliance showed a significantly better TCO than competitors such as the current VMware/EMC based setup, with no additional hidden costs.

Hyperconvergence is a step on the road to where FBD wants to be. It allows the IT team to bring cloud in-house, and link it up to their multi-cloud strategy. Ultimately, Kyne would like to be able to adopt a best-of-breed approach for all applications, including the use of multi-cloud and hybrid architectures.

"For me, it's what's the most appropriate solution? What's the best way to get it there, and also can we avoid three-to-five-year big upgrade projects?" he said. "We need to bake in flexibility, and we need to bake in an opportunity to be able to harness new technologies and do things differently. So, our view is multi-cloud."

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Managing legacy change: FBD Insurance CTO Enda Kyne on restoring IT control

'We centralised everything internally and started to get the practices right, from requirements through to development standards'

To improve responsiveness and ease of management as well as to make moving to the cloud at some stage a possibility, Kyne took a decision to migrate some of FBD's on-premise systems onto Nutanix, starting with the policy admin system. As other systems are upgraded, they will follow suit, including a new enterprise content management system which is likely to have a hybrid cloud architecture to accommodate a recent investment in hardware to support the case management and workflow elements. So, it's a matter of working around what's there.

Try and learn

As well as futureproofing the infrastructure and making it cloud-ready, FBD is also looking to improve the flexibility of its technical staff. Kyne wants his engineers to feel more comfortable with experimentation, thinking like tech entrepreneurs.

"They're all very well certified in their respective areas, and sure, it's important to be able to demonstrate you've conformed to standards, but you also have to deliver, you know, you've got to be able to make the leap to delivering an impact."

This approach he calls ‘try and learn'. It means testing assumptions and not just accepting inherited opinions. This might include checking the metrics used to make business decisions.

"For example, using SaaS and open source software with some data analytics to factually prove assumptions about customer experience, product make-up, or likely customer adoption of new mobile technologies. Using ‘try and learn' we validate the truth, or otherwise, about assumptions. This allows us to solve business problems much quicker using proof-of-concept technology, and it aligns IT and business colleagues to look at the facts, something we value highly in our organisation. "

Inevitably, some fear the impact as the company moves to cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure. Reductions in numbers are not inevitable by any means, but Kyne does not shy away from the possibility.

"All I want is impactful outcomes, an easier way of doing things. And if the team dynamic changes over time, colleagues have the chance to re-skill in a new area and to develop their own career. After all, we are primarily responsible for our own career development and our career choices, it's up to us, so let's call a spade a spade."

Whatever the ultimate outcome, re-energising the workforce has led to a dramatic fall in staff turnover, now in low single digits, despite being "standard payers in a very competitive Dublin tech market. We offer more than salary, we give our staff a story to tell about creating new ways of working and getting ahead in a vibrant technical environment, and that's so much richer than having a list of projects on a CV", according to Kyne.

"So long as our teams deliver, we will create our own technical future, and with this new clean open tech and software-defined plus hybrid cloud, we're starting to enjoy playing with tech things again."