IS Consultancy skills

Some of us within Smart421 are currently looking at the “softer” skills required to enhance and develop our approach to running Consultancy engagements.  This isn’t about Project Management or Business Analysis, although these are important parts of any engagement.  It’s more about building relationships, managing the client, understanding personalities, leading teams and so on.

With this in mind, I’ve just finished a fairly intensive 5-day training course towards the ISEB certificate in IS Consultancy Practice.  The course is a great compliment to my ISEB Diploma in Business Analysis and builds on some of the ideas from the diploma.

Our trainer was Sue Calvert from Parity Training, who did a great job of covering a huge breadth of material, building in plenty of case study time for the group and keeping us interested for 5 days – thanks Sue! You can see the aims and syllabus on the Parity Training website, so I won’t repeat it all here.

I was joined by David Clothier of Siemens and Faisal Choudhry of Fujitsu.  Whilst it would have been good to have more people on the course, to get the ideas flowing and see how other people approached the case study, we got on well and managed to keep the energy up during the group work.

We covered a lot of ground, so there was an obvious trade-off in terms of depth.  But good use of case study work and homework (gasp!) really helped us get a better feel for some of the more important aspects.

Thursday’s homework was preparing a 10 minute presentation on a topic from the syllabus – I chose “Managing Bids and Contracts”, as these are areas that everyone in Smart421 is regularly involved in.

Some of the key things I learned or had re-inforced were:

• Identify Supporters and manage Blockers
  It’s crucial to understand who can help and hinder the achievement of your objectives.  Assuming your Sponsor isn’t a Blocker (!), get them to help with this.
• Use appropriate analysis tools and techniques to prompt you to capture and manage information
  Used well, MOST, SWOT, PESTLE, RACI, MANDACT (and many more!) can be really helpful.
• Build the relationship
  This is something that Smart421 already does pretty well – don’t treat engagements as one-off’s.  Build trust, demonstrate capability by delivering, identify other areas where you can genuinely help the client and the relationship will bloom and grow!
• Identify and manage Risks
  There are risks within the assignment, and there will be other risks to us as the supplier of Consultancy services.  It’s important to track all of these.
• Always clarify the budget
  This really determines whether the solution is Bugatti Veyron or Chevrolet Lacetti.  We forgot to do this at one stage on the case study.  D’oh.  Although we did find ways to make huge savings for the imaginary client – creating additional budget!
• Understand Mindsets, Personality Types and Motivations
  In the client and in your consultancy team.  This helps to tailor your approach, communication and deliverables, get the best out of your team and deliver maximum value to the client.
• People, Process, Technology
  In any transformation, remember there’s more to a solution than the IT/IS component.

I’m looking forward to putting some of these learnings into practice on upcoming engagements.

Fingers crossed for the 2 hour written exam on 14th August!  Must remember to make time for revision…

 

Telematics and retail insurance (aka “PAYD”)

First posting to the Smart421 blog.  Maybe I should just do a “hello world” effort?
Ach well, in for a penny…

Someone sent me a link to the Coverbox website a few weeks ago, as they knew I’d been involved, with Smart421, in Norwich Union’s Pay As You Drive (PAYD) programme in 2005/2006.  Last week, someone else sent me a link to this article on the future of Telematics within retail insurance which says:

“The company that clears the remaining hurdles first will undoubtedly steal a competitive march and grasp the opportunity to decommoditise a segment of the market”

Before I go any further, let me make it clear that I haven’t yet investigated the detail of how the Coverbox proposition works, either on a technical or contractual basis, although I’d be delighted if someone else has done and can set me straight.  So, with that in mind, these are just some thoughts triggered by the above websites…

By “hurdles” and “decommoditise” the author might mean things like:

• whoever figures out how to provide PAYD-type insurance cost-effectively
• whoever creates a genuinely valuable proposition for potential customers (ie not just insurance, but other stuff on top)
• it needs to become more than just a question of which insurer offers the cheapest insurance whether standard or PAYD

I’m inclined to disagree, at least to some extent, in regards to de-commoditisation.  If PAYD insurance is really ”the future” (and I can see arguments on both sides – but that’s another discussion), then I think part of the answer is to make the technology boxes and backbone (i.e. the expensive bits!) totally commoditised.  This is in line with trendy SaaS and Cloud principles, and it seems to me to be the only way to truly benefit from economies of scale in this area.

Enter Coverbox who, from November 2008, basically provide a PAYD “COTS” service that insurers can re-sell.  It’s then down to each insurer to create the value-added bit that will attract customers to use Coverbox through them, rather than a rival insurer.  This significantly lowers the barrier to entry, making it much easier for an insurer to join the PAYD game.

One of the next  “hurdles” might be whether and how the insurers can exploit the data generated by their customers - e.g. data sales, heavy-duty analysis to inform actuarial and pricing decisions, etc.  Assuming insurers can access the data on their insured parties (and only their insured parties) as held by Coverbox, they’re not much worse off than if they were running the database themselves.

However, I’d guess Coverbox will be retaining ultimate ownership of (anonymised) data and the right to sell this to third parties.  I’d also guess Coverbox won’t (yet?) provide a real-time, OLTP/OLAP capable database on which multiple insurers can happily dredge their data 24/7.  So does that mean the next opportunity is how to offer that analysis capability to insurers cost-effectively?

Coverbox’s website is already pushing the commodity aspect by telling customers they can choose from a panel of insurers to get the best price.  So insurers will need to position themselves and their value-add offerings quickly in order to “decommoditise” PAYD – otherwise Coverbox’s own message will dominate and part of the opportunity offered by PAYD will disappear.

Crikey…550 words for my first posting…maybe I’ll do a “hello world” next time.

Jamie.

PS The thoughts behind this post have already generated a bit of debate within Smart421, so there may be some follow-up comments coming soon.

Update…I’ve been reading a bit more detail in the Coverbox and CobraWunelli websites.  Still not a huge amount of information regarding how the technology actually works, but it seems that one of the components underlying Coverbox is M2M Connect, the international mobile telemetry platform from Orange.

This is especially interesting for us as Smart421 were involved in the creation of M2M Connect and continue to manage part of this service for Orange.