娇色导航

Cathy O'Sullivan? Kia ora and welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live. I'm Cathy O'Sullivan, editorial director for 娇色导航in Australia and New Zealand. And today I'm joined by Alex Smart who is Chief Technology Officer at Southern Cross Travel Insurance. Welcome, Alex, great to be chatting with you today. ?

Alex Smart? Yeah, Cathy, thank you very much. Yeah, great to be with you. Thanks for having me. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan? You're so welcome. Firstly, tell us about Southern Cross travel insurance as an organization. Can you give us a bit of an overview of Southern Cross travel insurance and what you and your team look after. ?

Alex Smart? Yes, very happy to super proud of working for this organization. So as the title infers, we are a travel insurer, but we've been around for about 40 years in New Zealand and around about 15 years in Australia.

We have a travel business in Australia and New Zealand, so we're Australasian. Last year we were with about a half a million customers, so as they tracked around the world and also around their own backyards, we do overseas and domestic travel insurance.

We are primarily a digital business, so we sell about 95% of our products online. So it's kind of important context for what technology is at Southern Cross travel insurance.

And we, although we have a business in New Zealand and Australia, we operate both businesses materially out of New Zealand. We're also really proud to be part of the Southern Cross group brand, which, if you are from New Zealand, you'll understand, is quite an iconic Kiwi brand. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan? It is indeed. And look, you and the team you've recently led a complete transformation of your core insurance platform. So can you walk us through, I guess, the scale of this transformation and why it was necessary? ?

Alex Smart? Sure, really happy to. And also, just before I head into that, just to let you know that in technology, we cover everything in our technology team. So we do data, platforms, cyber, software development, tests, systems analysts, and to business analysis, so the whole gamut of technology.

So heading into that transformation, that was actually quite useful, because we obviously run most of the areas that they're impacted on a technology perspective. But a transformation is more than a technology project. As you'll know, it involves the entire business. So the scale of this project is huge.

It's probably the largest transformation our business has ever done in the whole 40 years it's been trading and it involved replacing all of our core insurance platform, which, if anybody is in the insurance business will know, is essentially your business. Insurance is about data.

It is about risk, and so replacing your whole platform is replacing your business and everything that's downstream of that.

So all the applications that hang off, that all your customer experiences that hang off, that all of your integrations that hang off, that, all of that had to be rebuilt, and we only had 11 months to do it in because we had a contractual obligation to our current vendor.

So, yeah, was pretty huge. So as you said, you know, a transformation like that, it isn't just about technology. It's about the speed the execution, managing the change. And of course, that time frame that you mentioned was obviously a challenge.

But what were some of the other big challenges along the way? I think when you're doing a transformation, actually the hardest thing to do is get started.

I think because the scale of a transformation looks so enormous, it's really difficult to know how to start and where to start and what to do first. So I think our biggest challenge was actually breaking it down into bite sizes and figuring out where to start.

Once we started, things started to flow from there. But I think another thing that transformations do is that you can't assume that what you knew at the start is what you're going to know at the end.

And as we've gone down this transformation journey, we have learnt a lot.

And so an example of that is we constructed our teams in one way at the start of this transformation, and during the transformation process, we've actually reorganized ourselves around about four times, as we've moved through and learnt things, as we've run into different obstacles, as we've broken through these obstacles, as we've refined our scope, as we've gone we've definitely had to be and I use this word in the sense of the the little a or capital A Agile.

So not the agile framework, but actually the true nature of agility, which is being able to be flexible or open to change. I mean, I think that's been a big challenge for the team. You know, a technologist like certainty. They like to know what they're doing.

They're basically engineers at heart, and so having to build in that kind. Of flexible mindset has been a real challenge for the team, but it's been really, really good for us.

I think one of the other challenges was that recognizing that transformation is not a technology project, transformation is a business project.

So understanding who we needed to have involved right from the very start to make it real for the business to get what we needed from them, and for them to get what they need from us.

And to do that, we actually embedded the business in technology, which was also challenging at the start, figuring out how we work together and how that would flow. Yeah, so those are probably two of the biggest challenges.

Additionally, we had, obviously, a lot of focus on us, from our governance, our board. I think, you know, we're transforming our whole business. We're ripping out its core foundations. The board very interested in how well it was going to go.

So to kind of help with that, we actually bought an EY as our internal quality assurance partner. And they've kind of been our kind of friendly critic, if you like. And that's actually been super useful, because it's made us really examine what we're doing. Is it necessary?

Is it the right thing to do? But it's also helped us give assurance to our board. It means that we're not just saying that we're good, we're not marking our own homework. We've actually got a friendly critic marking our homework. So yeah, it's been really helpful. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan? Now, let's talk some more about the time frame that you did this in, because you had to rebuild, you know, some of those core, foundational applications, you know, all the customer facing applications that connect to your core.

So how did you and the team pull that one off? ?

Alex Smart? I still don't know how we actually pulled it off, but I think that it's actually got to do with the culture and the team, which I know we're going to talk about a bit later.

But technology transformation is not about the technology, it's actually about the people. And so I think how we've managed to pull it off is that we, our people, have owned every step of the way, every block that they've come across, they've seen their accountability to solve for.

And I actually think it's been the people and the culture that's helped us achieve this in that time frame.

I think if we'd had a different sort of culture, we probably would have still achieved the same outcome, but it might not have been so fast, because that kind of speed requires every single person involved to have high accountability and ownership of everything they're doing.

There's no room to sit back and go, Well, that's not my problem, you know, and throw it over the fence, so to speak.

So I really think that probably speed has been about people, and one of the other things, I think, has been about keeping the main thing the main thing. So often what happens in a transformation process, because they tend to go on for a reasonable amount of time.

The business gets a bit bored, and they wanting to get on with doing some other things.

And they want this transformation thing to be over so that they can get on with doing the, you know, the exciting things that they want to do, and there's a real temptation to be distracted and to be diverted into doing something else. It's cool and interesting.

And I think that keeping the main thing, the main thing, has been the other real reason why we've been able to do this in such a short period of time, so people and focus, ?

Cathy O'Sullivan? I love that, keeping the main thing the main thing as well. So look, and you've already mentioned that, you know, Southern Cross Travel Insurance is pushing towards that digital first feature.

So what does that actually look like in practice, and how does AI and data play into it? ?

Alex Smart? Yeah, that's the question that everybody's asking at the moment. So digital first future. We are already there. It's not really a future. Just about every business is digital first, even if they don't think they are.

Everything that underpins every transaction you do in your business is underpinned by some kind of technology. You know, your email, your banking transactions, your your file storage. So even if you don't sell anything online, you're still a digital business.

So I think the digital business is here, but I think what has changed over that COVID period is the expectation of the experience of the digital business, both from your internal customers, but also your actual customers that you're selling products to. They expect a different experience.

They expect to be able to do what they can do in person, digitally as well, and they want to have the option to choose which way they go.

Now, for businesses, that's a big challenge, because, you know, transforming things that you've been doing over the phone or through a human into a digital environment.

It's not necessarily that easy or that easy to scale, and that's where I think the emergence of new technologies like AI is changing the game, and so we're using AI. For instance, at the moment, to understand the sentiment of people who call us.

So we used to do sentiment analysis quite manually. We used to listen into calls. We used to review call recordings, but now we have continuous AI monitoring of customer sentiment, and it can even alert you know, your your contact center team leaders, when something's going off track.

And what that does is it just helps us provide a better experience immediately for our customers, whereas before it would have been, oh, six months ago, we found we weren't doing that well. Let's put a program in place to improve it.

Now we know instantly how well we're doing, and it can also help us pick up on where sentiment might be falling. It might be a particular product design. It might be something that they're finding that they can't do on a website.

So, you know, I think this is where ao is just accelerating those experiences and helping businesses to move faster. And I think we're very open to adopting that. I wouldn't call us bleeding edge, but I do think we're quite leading edge on some of that stuff.

And I think because we're a small business and we're quite an agile business, it's probably slightly easier for us to adopt some of those changes and test them.

If you've been a large, well established organization, it takes a bit more time to turn a big ship than a little boat. So speaking of turning big ships, you've led several transformation projects throughout your career. So what is it that attracts you to them?

And what advice would you have to new CIOs, who are maybe taking on their first major change project? Yeah, okay, so the first part of your question, I'll tackle first, which is what attracts me to transformation. And that's I'm essentially a problem solver at heart.

I actually I probably don't have deep skills than anything else. That's the one thing that I would own as my deep skill is being a problem solver. I love facing into a real challenge and figuring out how to solve for that challenge.

That's what transformation is, because you don't go down a transformation path unless you have a really painful problem to solve, because it's not an easy thing to do. Incremental improvement is far better because it has less impact. But you don't do incremental change for a really big problem.

You do transformational change for a really big problem. So I think that's what's attracted me to transformation, because I love solving those problems, and I think there are some things in transformation that, if you know in advance, can help you really be successful at them.

So we've already talked about one, which is, keep the objective front and center. Don't get distracted. Remember the problem you're trying to solve, and be really single minded about solving that problem. But alongside that form, the simplest path to get there to solve that problem.

Don't make it complex. Don't try and add everything and all at once, go down the simplest path to get to that objective. There's plenty of time later to improve it.

And once you do that, once you form that path, then you can kind of understand what capabilities you're going to need, and you can assemble a small group of people highly skilled in those capabilities to form a lead team.

And that core team is essential for the success of delivering a transformation. And I would suggest that that team can't be people from outside of your business.

That core team has to be people who are in your business because nobody loves your business like people who work in it. You can have some brilliant contracting partners, and we do have some brilliant contracting partners, but they can't love your business like your people do.

So that core team is essential, but you're never going to get enough people for a transformation from your internal team. So obviously you need to grow that, and you need to scale up by bringing in resources that you can scale down later.

And that's easy to do once you have that real core team that really has ownership, that's highly capable that understands the simple path that you've laid out and can hold the main thing and make the main thing the main thing. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan? And of course, you mentioned about working with the rest of the business on big digital initiatives. So what strategies have you found most effective when you are fostering you know that executive buy in and collaboration on major digital initiatives. ?

Alex Smart? Yeah, that is always one of the biggest challenges in a transformation. I think structure really helps.

So in our business at the executive level, we share our KPIs, so I don't have separate KPIs from a CFO or my COO or any of that we all have the same shared KPI.

And the brilliance of that is, is that a transformation project is not my KPI to deliver. It is our KPI to deliver. I just happen to be the sponsor of it, and I think that structure really makes a difference, and I'd recommend.

With any organization undergoing a transformation, to make sure that at an executive or senior leadership level, that the KPI for delivery is a shared one. So that's the first thing, because it's very powerful when competing priorities hit to have one KPI shared.

If you've got KPIs that are competing, then that's where you things start to fall apart. And the other thing is communication, and it's about communicating the right things. So we always ask ourselves three questions when we're communicating.

The first one is, what's in it for the people we're communicating to? The second thing is, what's the impact for them, and what does it mean for them? Those three things are kind of all the same thing, but they have slightly different nuances.

And if you approach every piece of communication like that, then you're always going to get engagement. And it's really important. Too often we communicate what we think is important, but we don't put the lens on of the person who's receiving that.

It's the same at all levels of your business, from board to exec, to senior leadership, to people on the ground who are doing the delivery. So those are the two strategies that we've deployed, and they've worked really well. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan? So Alex, you mentioned earlier the benefit that a good team culture has had for you in terms of being able to move faster, and indeed, Southern Cross travel insurance won Best ICT team culture at the 娇色导航awards a couple of years ago.

So what are the key ingredients of a strong it culture? ?

Alex Smart? Yeah, thanks, Cathy. That's a great question. As I said before, I think that we've been able to move fast because of the because of the culture of our team.

And I think you know, when I reflect on it, there are three main pillars that make the culture of our team. The first one is empathy. The second one is structure, and the third one is maintenance.

And so if you really look at those three pillars, empathy is about the way in which you treat each other, the way in which you receive and give feedback, advice, conflict and it really sets the tone for how your team engages with each other.

The second one, which is structure, is how you structure your teams to enable that. And I'll give you a really good example of what I mean here. We used to work in siloed domains.

So we used to work in developers, testers, analysts, because that's the reporting lines that you're in. So it's kind of easier. It's also the specialty domain that you work in.

So, you know, it makes sense, but we heading into this project, we recognize that that's not going to work for us, because what we're delivering requires all of those views at once.

But we couldn't have everybody in the whole team every single day, so we broke our structure up into teams, squads if you want that were really cross functional. So they weren't your reporting lines.

They were what you were trying to they were based around what you were trying to develop and release. So features, and that's worked really well for us.

And I think I mentioned before that, We've restructured ourselves about four times during this project, and that's that's to do with those squads. What we've done is we've rearranged how that works, depending on what stage of the transformation we're in. Haven't changed any reporting lines.

Reporting lines are still the same, but you have your squad lead, and that might be a different person to the person that manages you every day. That structure has been essential for maintaining the right culture. And then the third thing, which I just mentioned, is maintenance.

You have to work a culture. You have to address things as you see them, immediately. If you're seeing behaviors that are not in alignment with the culture. You have to call it out.

You can't let it carry on, and you have to give permission for everybody to do that. That's not my job to do. That's the entire team's job to do. The team needs to protect the culture.

And I think we've got to that point now in our team, where everyone in the team protects that culture because, because they love it, because they want to work there. So that's really what I would say, the key ingredients of a strong culture. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan? Now look, we're seeing some backlash against DEI initiatives in other parts of the world, and certainly from some of the biggest technology companies in the world. Is diversity still relevant? I mean, what are the benefits you've seen from having a diverse team? ?

Alex Smart? Diversity is essential. It's not even just relevant. It's essential. You cannot get good design with groupthink. Good design comes out of that conflicting debate that you have that brings all views to something, and then then you get great design, you get great delivery.

So I'd say diversity is essential. We have a really diverse team, and as I said before, when you have a lot of diversity, you get a lot of debate, but debate with the right culture ends up with really amazing outcomes and enables you to tackle really big problems.

And it is actually the only way that you can do a truly successful transformation. So we do have a lot of healthy conflict in our team because of the diversity, but what we don't have is group think.

So, yeah, my I do not understand this view that diversity is no longer relevant. It doesn't make sense to me. I think the people saying that potentially have never seen what really great design, really great delivery looks like.

So I know another area that you're passionate about, Alex is mentoring. And I know you've been involved in New Zealand tax Mentoring Circles. So why is mentoring important to you, and what impact have you seeing from these types of initiatives.

Yeah, mentoring is important, because I don't think it's easy to be what you can't see. And if we look at technology, we still are really under representative in certain diverse groups, one being women, but there is also culture, gender.

And so I think particularly if you look at cyber and engineering and senior leadership and technology, you know, it's really very little women there, let alone any other type of diversity.

And so I think if you can't see what you can be, it's really difficult to forge that path, but there are some really amazing women who have forged that path, and when they mentor, when they show up, when they are prepared to share their learnings and to be the face of what that change looks like, then other young women can see that, and then it's easier to believe that You can be that.

So that's why I believe mentoring is important. It's part of giving back, but you also get so much out of it.

In the mentoring that I've done, I would say I got more out of mentoring from the women that were in that mentoring group than they got from me, and I it just makes me so optimistic about our future when I see the caliber of young women who are passionate about technology, and they're passionate about their role in it, and they're hungry for it, yeah, so I got a lot out of it, but yeah, it's really important that you, if you belong to a minority group, that you can stand up and and be really visible, so that so that others who follow behind you believe that they can do it too.

?

Cathy O'Sullivan? Now, the stats for women in tech are not great, and certainly, as you mentioned, you know, we've a long way to go, particularly with women in a senior tech leadership role.

So what are some other ways you think the industry can better support women in those tech leadership roles. What have you seen work? ?

Alex Smart? Yeah well I mean, I think there are some big things that you can do, and then there's some little things that you can do. So in the bigger things, it's about creating the real opportunity. So when you are recruiting, make sure you aren't recruiting.

What looks like you really check yourself, look at the makeup of your team, really intentionally seek after diversity, whatever that looks like, because it's so easy to recruit what's in the mirror, you know, because you instinctively identify and feel comfortable with that.

So I think what the industry can do is really challenge themselves to really intentionally look at what they have and intentionally recruit and provide opportunities for the for what's different, but also on the little things.

I just went to the National Cyber Conference down in Wellington, and only one vendor had women size polo shirts.

You know, I know it's a tiny little thing, but when you're a woman down there, and all of the swag that you're getting is all for men, you know, it says something. It really does say something about where our industry is at.

So and think even in the little things you can make, you can make real changes. You know, intentional diversity is what I've seen works best. No one is asking for a handout or diversity for the sake of it.

And when I hear that, it makes me sad for our industry, because it assumes that there are no, or very little, highly skilled people who are diverse. And my experience is the opposite.

So I guess what I'm saying overall is I feel at the moment, we're still in a place where we can't see beyond what's in the mirror, but we're getting there, and the more women that stand up and be seen and and talk about their journeys, I think the easier that will get.

?

Cathy O'Sullivan? So you've achieved an awful lot at Southern Cross Travel Insurance. What's next for you and the team with your digital journey? ?

Alex Smart? We've got two really clear objectives for the next three years. The first one is that we want to be the best digital experience for any direct to market product, so not just in our industry, but any industry. So.

So the customer experience in the digital world is a real focus for us, and we're going to continue to improve that, to leverage new technologies, to continuously try and understand our customers better, to get really close to them.

So that's the first one, but the second one is that we want to be the easiest to do business with, and in our world, that's going to be, how do we look at our B to B customers?

How do we make interoperability native or really easy, so that when you do business with us, super easy to connect to our systems? So in the digital world, that's actually not an easy thing to achieve, but something we're really focused on. ?

Cathy O'Sullivan? Well, we look forward to seeing the fruits of your labor. Alex Smart, Chief Technology Officer at Southern Cross Travel Insurance, thank you so much for your time today. ?

Alex Smart? Thanks, Cathy.?