Swiss Reinsurance Company Case Study

Baumann is quick to point out that using technology effectively is critical for making sense of Swiss Re’s data across multiple aspects of the business. One example Baumann cites is, “when we get a claim after something happens, then classically, someone will need to type this information from an email into a system. From that system, someone would review it, and put some more information into another system. However, everything could be extracted more or less, automatically, and then digitized.”

But technology is only part of the solution. If people are unable to use the technology, it is impossible to realize its potential in delivering business value. According to Baumann, “this is the classical adoption problem with the latest technologies…you spend tons of time finding the right information somewhere, preparing it and distilling insights out of it.”

Swiss Re understood that getting people to work together was key to unlocking the value from Digital Workplace technology. Baumann points out that “innovation, for us, doesn’t come from tough, stringent, managed research projects. Innovation comes from the entire company…and collaboration and open problem-sharing discussion are at its core.”

To enable this collaboration, Swiss Reinsurance company turned to Microsoft as a key technology supplier. According to Baumann, “As part of our digital workplace program, where we embark on adopting the latest technologies, we are on a tough journey on the Microsoft road, with Exchange, SharePoint, and other platforms.”

The learning curve that Swiss Re found themselves on after the unsuccessful deployment of SharePoint was realizing the importance of user adoption for new tools and solutions. For many companies, moving to an environment like SharePoint or Microsoft 365 is often treated as a purely technical project without thinking adequately about what it means for the end user. For Swiss Re, training their users in what to expect and how to use SharePoint was a major step that was missed when they first implemented the platform.

Around this time, Swiss Re decided to employ harmon.ie’s solution as a strategy of putting the human in the center, bringing SharePoint into everyday use for their employees. Swiss Re was accustomed to an integrated work environment from their days of using LotusNotes, where business apps run within the email client. In the Notes environment, harmon.ie had already enabled Swiss Re information workers to capture and share emails and documents in SharePoint. So harmon.ie’s contribution to humanizing the user experience by making it easy for workers to collaborate from the email client was well understood.

The introduction of harmon.ie has been a key component to Swiss Re’s digital workplace initiative, because it has delivered a boost in the adoption rate of SharePoint, as well as an improvement of overall collaboration and employee efficiency across the company. CIO Baumann summarizes the harmon.ie contribution:

“We have as part of our digital workplace program, where we embark on adopting the latest technologies, a strong journey in the Microsoft world with the respective Exchange, SharePoint, and other platforms. Enabling a simpler access to and adoption of these technologies is, on our side, highly supported by harmon.ie. So now you can share documents in a simple way, how you can interact with people, and even on my mobile phone, I can get access to all of my documents wherever I am in the world thanks to our harmon.ie app.”

Due to its success in fostering collaboration, harmon.ie has become a key partner in the Swiss Re digital workplace initiative. One of the reasons for this is the robustness of the solution. Swiss Re has moved from SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2016, to Microsoft 365 with harmon.ie, but the user experience didn’t need to change. This means that while the company stays up to date with the latest cutting-edge tools across their platforms, their employees don’t have to learn how to use the next version or even adapt to a different look and feel. Furthermore, using harmon.ie, the ability to move from SharePoint 2013 to 2016 and Microsoft 365 seamlessly is a huge plus, precisely because of this seamless integration and consistency across all platforms, including mobile. As Swiss Re moves to the cloud, it also means that workers won’t have to toggle between disparate apps within, and beyond the Microsoft 365 environment.

Having harmon.ie on laptops, desktops and mobile devices is helping improve Swiss Re employees’ user experience. But more importantly, it means Swiss Re experts are able to collaborate and spark the innovation that Swiss Re needs to realize their corporate strategy; to be a knowledge company.

harmon.ie continues to support Swiss Re’s digital workplace journey to the cloud. harmon.ie’s current and future product offerings are uniquely geared to the business cloud environment, helping to bring together unstructured data from many disparate apps in meaningful ways, so people can focus on what’s important, rather than searching for information. As such, it is a perfect fit for Swiss Re’s current and future information challenges.