Swiss Reinsurance Company Case Study

To be able to insure and reinsure projects like the hydroelectric plant in Brazil, Swiss Reinsurance company depends on teams of experts who create knowledge about risk assessment from mountains of available data. According to Baumann, “we are experts in how to work with data, and on methodologies when we talk about bringing in data – and also in leveraging the latest technologies.”

Baumann identifies particular challenges in making sense of available data, noting that “the majority of information is unstructured. It is unrelated - meaning it comes from very different sources. You need to put it into context. Understand it. We do not employ hundreds and thousands of people [to do this, so] we need to do this in an intelligent way and that’s where our focus is.”

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.”

Part of the tough part of that journey came from the implementation of SharePoint, in what was summarized as an ineffective roll-out of the platform. As Vice President and Senior Enterprise Architect Jochen Kleinschnittger remembers, “we made the mistake of introducing SharePoint as a technical project, thinking ‘let the IT team do the IT stuff, and then the business users will adopt it and will just use it’”.

The adoption of SharePoint was low, so business goals were not realized.

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.”