Product Management
The Product Management group has successfully completed two Diamond and Composer releases this year and are finishing up the 533.006 to be released June 1st.
We have not only been adding new features, interfaces and correcting defects with each release, but we have also been including factory improvements in each release.
One factor improvement that is worthy to note is the new Interface Configuration Dashboard (ICD) which allows us to have “one-stop shopping” for enabling and configuring all Diamond interfaces.
While we still have to migrate previous interfaces to the ICD, all new interfaces will be able to be configured from this one place. We believe this will save a lot of time and effort in setting up and troubleshooting the initial interfaces for implementations.
We have also been working on changes to Diamond that will enable the Covenir customer service team to be more efficient when on the phone with agents and consumers. We refer to these changes as our “BPO Top 10 List” and we have already completed several with a few another called “The Employee Check List” in 533.006. This task will help the Covenir underwriter know what needs to be reviewed on each new business policy and what was already verified automatically by Diamond. This keeps the Covenir underwriter from having to go into multiple screens to confirm the necessary information, thereby saving time.
Client Services
Client Services has been continuing our focus on quality and great customer service in 2019. We conducted an independent testing assessment. Based on the results of this assessment we are working to make changes to create more fully integrated teams that include functional analysts, developers, and testers. The goals of these changes include proactively identifying issues with specifications and shortening the period of time that elapses between development and testing. We are also refining our development process by focusing on quality fixes and reducing failures. Our development process includes documenting both developer analysis and testing which give us insight into the work our developers on each ticket. We are also working on reducing ticket failures through retrospective reviews of all failed tickets and the implementation of a new code review process.
For the second year in a row our clients are showing unprecedented growth. In response to this growth we have increased the staff at Insuresoft by 33%! Client Service Analysts, Support Developers and Testers are among these new hires and are helping our support team scale to meet the growing needs of our clients.
We are excited about the growth of our clients and Insuresoft and are working hard towards our goal of increasing client satisfaction and improving quality throughout 2019.
Implementation Services
The Insuresoft Implementation Services Team has continued its focus on evaluating all aspects of the implementation process. In May 2019, key Insuresoft stakeholders met in Tuscaloosa for a 2-day working session dedicated to Implementation Optimization. Participants worked together to identify opportunities for improvements, propose solutions, and select and assign the top 11 Implementation Improvements to be put into practice in late 2019 and early 2020.
One of the key changes is the expanded use of collaboration across our project teams and with our clients. With a handful of implementation projects in 2019, we have successfully piloted expanded collaboration by co-locating focused project teams of analysts, developers, and testers during the initial implementation phases of the projects. Doing so allowed for quick resolution of questions and concerns related to requirements and testing. A number of clients experienced very short timeframes for the delivery of their implementation project. While we still have a lot to learn and to develop into a consistent and repeatable process, we look forward to continuing this initiative in 2019 and 2020.
Look for this and other key improvements throughout the remainder of 2019 and into 2020. As always, thank you for support and partnership as we implement these improvements.
Technology
The technology and engineering team has been in high gear since our last report. In late 2018 we took the lead role in porting our existing Xamarin-based mobile diamond consumer application to a more modern and extensible Ionic based technology. In addition to coalescing all our mobile code into a single base thread for all platforms, the new technology gave us the freedom to implement new browser-based progressive-web consumer portals, while still intimately supporting the particular needs of mobile devices. Diamond Mobile may now be deployed natively from both the Google and Apple app stores, or to a mobile browser with enhanced capabilities. While making this transition to Ionic, we also implemented a far more advance configuration, build, and deployment pipeline hosted from the Composer portal. Today a Composer user can create a new Diamond Mobile App, complete with its own distinct workflow selections, branding media, and color scheme. Still entirely from Composer, the new app can be built and published directly to the Apple and Google Play stores, without ever seeing a line of code.
Additionally, the technology and engineering team made a full dive into microservice architecture and all the latest associated technology and infrastructure updates. We selected FNOL as our prototype workflow and implemented the full prescriptive architecture and technology stack as specified by Microsoft Architecture Team. The FNOL microservice prototype included multiple UIs written in: C# over Microsoft MVC, Dart over Google Flutter, and Typescript over Ionic. We implemented the gateway pattern using Microsoft’s Ocelot package for supporting service routing, tracing, and security. We implemented the FNOL logic services using C# over WebAPI2. We implemented a guaranteed-delivery intra-service bus pattern using Rabbit MQ /Azure Service Bus and loss notice storage with MongoDB/Azure Cosmos DB. The entire prototype was successfully hosted on the Azure Cloud using containerized .NET Core applications over Docker on Linux in a Kubernetes cluster.
Finally, we are continuing to dramatically enhance the power and scope of our Diamond as a Service automation on Composer. You may recall that we started last year in our efforts to fully support all of Microsoft’s platform functionality offered on the Azure cloud, and we are continuing to expand our automated hosting options across all tiers and options. The new Deployment Management dashboard in Composer provides streamlined and authorized control of environments, with new capabilities to automate and reduce work through “environment grouping” and “deployment scheduling”. IaaS, Infrastructure as a Service, options have been added to the existing PaaS, Platform as a Service, capabilities in order to provide environment designers with the ability to maximize and balance price, performance and scalability at all levels. New options are presently being added to support reporting capabilities out of Microsoft’s PowerBI in addition to our existing SQL Reports configurations. Finally, we are adding the capability to run all tiers and all services from a single virtual machine as a highly managed cost option for maximizing test scenario bandwidth.