Frequent releases drive innovation

Imagine a scenario where your competitor implements a large upgrade of their core system, and for a period of time leaves you struggling to keep pace with their innovations. It’s frustrating, but there’s a catch – your competitor’s approach is that of a sprint when it should be a marathon of continuous innovation.

When innovation stalls

Your competitor sought short term gains at the expense of consistent, long term innovation capabilities. By choosing to update their core system only once per year, they experience a short burst of innovation that quickly loses steam when compared against a company implementing a frequent release strategy.

Aren’t updates supposed to make things better?

The issues quickly mount up. Your competitor’s massive core update has raised myriad problems, compatibility issues and introduced new feature-breaking bugs that now require the weary and tired IT department to work through them one-by-one in an attempt to fix the cascading issues and get the business back on track. This will take time, money and resources away from where it matters – developing new products and improving the customer experience; somewhat defeating the purpose of applying a major core update in the first place.

And so your competitor has lost focus, they are losing market ground, and the last thing they are able to do now is innovate.

And yet all of this could have been avoided had they adopted a frequent release framework.

Frequent releases support agile businesses

Now imagine that in the same year your business adopted a frequent release strategy for your core platform. By doing so you have enabled your business to adapt quickly to sudden changes or trends in the market.

Gone is the existential fear that you’re behind the innovation curve, or slowly losing ground to competitors. Your core platform is evolving constantly thanks to frequent releases, and the feedback loop between the core platform developers and your employees has been dramatically shortened, pleasing all involved and driving improvements across the board.

This ensures true agility, and gives you the peace of mind that you can react to any sudden changes in the market without kicking up a dust cloud of disruption around your business operations and product innovations.

Change is a constant 

In a world that never stands still and constantly reinvents and innovates itself, our insurance businesses must be enabled to keep pace with changing demands. A core platform solution that doesn’t adhere to a frequent release strategy isn’t truly agile or able to keep pace.

As the insurance industry continues to experience seismic changes brought about by changing customer demands, the power of big data and nimble tech-driven insurtechs, insurance companies must be positioned and empowered to realise their business needs in the shortest time frame possible. Without adopting a frequent release strategy, insurance companies are putting themselves at a major disadvantage, and going forward things will get tougher as they are forced to spend precious time dealing with past problems.

A frequent releases framework has no such limitations, and actively empowers you to look forward without fear of failure, freeing your business to focus on breaking new ground.