Mojgan Lefebvre, Liberty Mutual Insurance | Cloud Foundry Summit 2017
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 22/06/2017

Mojgan Lefebvre talks with Stu Miniman & John Troyer at Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara, CA.

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https://siliconangle.com/2017/06/19/why-devops-is-driving-organizational-change-at-liberty-mutual-cloudfoundry-womenintech/

Why DevOps is driving internal change at Liberty Mutual

The cloud, copious amounts of data generation, analytics and the Internet of Things are disrupting organizations by changing the foundation of how they deliver products and services. In a digital world, insurance companies are beginning to establish new business models around developer operations, and many are becoming software development companies as they shift to new ways of assessing risk and serving customers.  

“Our world is changing; technology’s driving a lot of that change. We know that we’ve got to be a big player in that area as well. We’ve got to become one of those software companies that can actually sell insurance opposed to the other way around,” said Mojgan Lefebvre (pictured), senior vice president and chief information officer of global specialty at Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.

The CIO’s role at many insurance companies is also evolving into supporting their businesses through software development. Lefebvre is one CIO who is leading the change at Liberty Mutual Insurance to bring development and the business together.

She spoke about the impact the digital transformation is having on the industry with Stu Miniman (@stu), John Troyer (@jtroyer), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara, California.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Mojgan Lefebvre in our Women in Tech feature.

Changing business and changing minds
The insurance industry is facing many challenges in the digital age. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s “Top Insurance Industry Issues in 2017” report, moving to the cloud is imperative for many insurers to improve infrastructure, expand their technology ecosystem, introduce new products into new markets, innovate product development and mitigate the talent shortage.

Most organizations are housing legacy systems and infrastructure that cannot support new technology or the demands of the real-time interactions that agents and customer have come to expect. So many companies are taking a greenfield approach to replacing legacy systems and just beginning in a cloud environment to upgrade the information technology infrastructure. 

One challenge Lefebvre faced was deciding what goes to the cloud first. She had to learn as she went through it, and she noted that while a greenfield environment was ideal, looking at the existing environment raises many questions, such as weighing the effects of moving dev environments in terms of how it will interact with the production environments and multiple cloud support.

“The global applications always make it much more difficult as you think, ‘How do you replicate among different clouds in different geographies?’ Those are some of the blockers that we’ve got to tackle and make sure that we get around,” she said.

Competition from new players in the insurance industry and the invasion of technology companies in the market is changing the company from the inside out, Lefebvre stated. The insurance industry needs to enable new business applications to meet its constituents’ demands.

“Our employees, our consumers now have all these other software companies that they have experience with, and so their expectations are very different. You know, they’ve got one experience when they’re at home and then they come into the workplace and it looks like … they’ve gone back 100 years. So that paradigm needs to change,” Lefebvre said.

Developing from within
The developers within Liberty Mutual led the company to Pivotal Software Inc. and Cloud Foundry, an application platform for cloud computing, to accelerate its transformation. There were pockets of developers who were already sold on the company and the platform, making it easier for other developers to adopt, according to Lefebvre.

In terms of the “business” being responsive to Pivotal, Lefebvre explained that the tech company helped to shift the business mindset from thinking about making it happen all at once to transforming in iterations.

In a “2017 State of DevOps Report“ by Puppet (formerly Puppet Labs) noted that “the ability to develop and deliver software efficiently and accurately is a key differentiator and value driver for all organizations.” With this in mind, Liberty Mutual’s  IT leadership team created the company’s IT manifesto about a year ago and added some “bold, audacious moves” to extend the reach of its challenges. A DevOps/IT strategy evolved that is now driving many of the company’s goals.   

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Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit.