We Want to Have Our Cake and Eat it Too: Agile and Reliable Core Systems

  • Nicole Bruns

November 20, 2019

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In the world of improvisational comedy, one of the unbreakable rules is to accept what your partner or fellow actors say and then add something to it. This is referred to as “Yes, and…” thinking. The idea is that you’re building a story together, rather than pivoting in a number of directions. How in the world do improv comedy techniques relate to innovation in property and casualty core systems? Hear me out.

Our customers have been hammering home three important imperatives. They want to increase agility, make smarter and faster decisions, and simplify IT. During the recent Guidewire Connections conference, this message was delivered by our CEO, Mike Rosenbaum.

The takeaway isn’t that Guidewire is developing a record number of new capabilities, processes, and services to help customers achieve these imperatives. It’s that we’re delivering all of that innovation and investing in our reliable core system for those operational activities that make your business tick. In other words, we’re responding with “Yes, and…

The best example came during the product keynote presentation, where Global Head of Products and Engineering Diego Devalle, along with Chief Technology Officer Ray Kreisel, showcased a visionary use case of PolicyCenter Cloud. PolicyCenter Cloud leverages our decades of development in PolicyCenter but combines it with digital and data capabilities to offer more of an end-to-end solution—a prime example of “Yes, and…” thinking.

PolicyCenter Cloud innovation principles align with our customers’ key imperatives:

  • Simplify IT → low-code configuration

  • Increase agility → rapid product design and digital delivery

  • Make smarter, faster decisions → infuse analytics

Diego and Ray demonstrated how insurers can rapidly create, test, and deploy a new product—mobile phone insurance—in a matter of minutes. They began by leveraging Advanced Product Designer to visually create product attributes, which were then automatically accepted into PolicyCenter. PolicyCenter leveraged rapid-start rate book templates and business-friendly rules definitions to make product changes. To round out the new product, Diego and Ray leveraged Experience Manager, powered by the Guidewire Jutro™ Design Framework, to configure and personalize the digital experience.

They then opened the process up by pushing the mobile phone insurance product to the entire audience for a quote-and-bind experience. We saw live, real-time analytics showing the audience getting quotes and purchasing the insurance.

Although this process was demonstrated in a linear fashion for on-stage purposes, the beauty of this flow is that you can go back and repeat steps, like re-rating or adding new business rules. Insurers can iterate rapidly to design products in the most agile environment. All of this is made possible by the reliable foundation that is PolicyCenter. Agile + reliable = “Yes, and...”

You can watch both keynote presentations from Connections 2019 here. We look forward to expanding these concepts into more use cases—not just for PolicyCenter but also for ClaimCenter and beyond.