Driving a digital transformation - an interview with JLT Group CIO Ian Cohen

JLT Group CIO Ian Cohen tells Danny Palmer how collaboration tools, big data, mobile devices and more have helped the insurance broker become a global force

Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group CIO Ian Cohen had a big task on his hands when he took the top IT position at the insurance brokers in 2009, not least when it came to ensuring the firm's 9,500 employees both in the UK and overseas had the appropriate technology to properly serve clients.

"When I joined JLT, we were probably better described as international rather than global and that was reflected in the way our technology was organised," Cohen tells Computing, describing IT as "hampered by a failing first generation infrastructure outsource".

What was needed was a "ground-up rebuild" that saw the firm go through "a genuine people, process and technology change". It was only after basic IT systems were upgraded, Cohen says, that JLT could start building towards a "global technology capability".

That came in the form of a scheme named JLT Insight, which focused around a number of key pillars including big data analytics and collaboration, and had an overriding aim of "enhancing the relationship with our customers". Part of the initiative saw JLT examining how it could better harness its existing Salesforce applications.

"The thing for us was to not look at Salesforce as a product and not to see it in isolation," says Cohen. "It was seeing it in the context of how we create a mechanism whereby our client executives have the best possible tools to know more about their clients than anyone else?

"When one of our client execs goes and sees our clients, there's a moment of truth when they can answer that one question or provide that one nugget of information that your competition can't," he says, adding that Salesforce has brought the ability "to drive a single view of the customer and systematically a way of improving those client relationships".

Brokering is a very data-intensive business. "Data is the lifeblood of our business," says Cohen, but he also believes that many businesses don't actually know what to do with the data they collect. "Lots of organisations build these huge monoliths of data then try to work out what to do with them," he says.

Cohen suggests this is because some firms are "getting seduced by the big data hype cycle".

"For a large number of organisations, 80 to 90 per cent of the data you need to transform your business, you've already got. You need a 'big find' solution, not more data," he says.

The important thing, Cohen says, is to use analytics to gain insight from the data you already have and not to waste resources on gathering extra data that may never ever be used.

"There absolutely are some businesses that need that serendipitous collection of data, but a lot of us just need to understand what we've got, how to get value out of it and how to serve it to our clients and colleagues in a way that's valuable," he says. "That's why we talk about interpretive analytics and data visualisation - it's all about outcomes."

In addition to harnessing analytics to provide JLT staff and clients with the best possible service, better collaboration is another key aim of Cohen's IT strategy. His goal is to create "a genuinely global conversation" using Chatter, the enterprise social network from Salesforce.

"Email is a horrible tool for collaboration, it's the least collaborative tool I know," Cohen says. "What Salesforce Chatter has enabled us to do is make good on that theme of global conversation."

However, the IT department was careful not to force staff to use the platform, instead allowing its use to grow organically within the organisation.

"If it's seen as something the IT department just foists on you it'll rarely get used, so it has to gain its own traction and own momentum, it has to go almost viral and that's exactly what happened at JLT," says Cohen.

"Of course, the first conversations are always the 'who's coming for a beer' type, but that conversation moves on to ‘I'm going to see client X, does anyone know anything about them?', and that's when the magic starts happening," he says.

"We went from zero to 8,000 active Chatter users - in an organisation that's only 9,500 worldwide - and we measure sentiment and how many people are posting often and our social media activity is market leading," he says.

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Driving a digital transformation - an interview with JLT Group CIO Ian Cohen

JLT Group CIO Ian Cohen tells Danny Palmer how collaboration tools, big data, mobile devices and more have helped the insurance broker become a global force

"Chatter hasn't replaced email, which is an interaction of record, typically a two-party interaction of record. Chatter is different, it's the equivalent of the unstructured conversation which delivers enormous value," he says.

Like at nearly all enterprises these days, JLT's staff increasingly rely on mobile devices in their day-to-day work. "We don't have a BYOD strategy," says Cohen. "What we have is a 'best tool for the best outcome' strategy, which might be your own device."

Staff can use laptops, iPads, iPhones, Android devices and BlackBerry smartphones, with Good for Enterprise running in the background to keep corporate information secure.

"We absolutely love the idea of not being the IT department which says 'no'; that's a thing of the past. There are some things we'll reject, but we are big advocates of the Good solutions - our colleagues get the upside of their own the device and we get the assurance over security. It's about treating people like grown-ups."

Cohen believes having a robust mobile device management solution is key to giving users the freedom to choose the device that best suits their needs.

"There was a time when BlackBerry was the only game in town. Now that level of security and guaranteed delivery and mobile processing is available on a variety of devices," he says.

"So if you have someone who has a particular disposition to a device type or a certain way of working, why not help them do that?" he asks.

"We've had many users give laptops back when we've been using Good on iPads because they say in reality I was only using my laptop as a glorified email machine with a big screen."

Cohen believes a less accommodating approach to enterprise mobility would make JLT's staff much less productive.

"We're in the business of making you as productive as you can possibly be, we're not in the business of locking you up," he says.

"There's a level of maturity that goes alongside that, commitments on both side, but at the end of the day, isn't that what technology was supposed to be about? Making us more productive and making it easier, not making it less productive and restrictive."

Looking to the future, Cohen suggests connected devices and the Internet of Things will transform how the insurance broker goes about its business.

"It is going to fundamentally change the way we consume and act on data. If you think about our business, a lot of our activity was actuarial where clever people build models and took views on what might happen in future, but IoT moves us from actuarial to actual - it gives us insight into what's happening in real time," he says.

However, Cohen believes that the potential for collecting data from almost anything brings social and ethical implications that need to be considered.

"It presents a whole other set of challenges about how to use data and we're still working out what that means. Just because you can collect all this information, should you?" he asks.

"What are the social and ethical obligations and implications around a connected-everything world? It's not something I see written about much and I think we're coming to this point where the debate needs to be had.

"It's more than just privacy and I guess we can't say that the jury's out because they haven't even sat," Cohen says.