Deloitte talks digital transformation at Red Hat Summit Sydney

Deloitte Digital and client Southern Cross Health Society revealed key learnings of the latter's digital transformation journey at the Red Hat Summit in Sydney yesterday.

Southern Cross Health Society is New Zealand’s largest private healthcare organisation that offers a range of insurance products.

The not-for-profit boasts over one million customers in New Zealand.

Samuel Koo, head of platforms, provided insights of Southern Cross’ digital transformation journey.

Koo spoke of the imperative the company faced to modernise its IT infrastructure.

“We have lots of individual applications that are suited for particular products or services."

"But over the last few years, we're seeing that these individual products need to be connected, integrated."

"And that means the complexity is not actually multiplied, it becomes an exponential thing,” Koo said.

“Any new initiative can take years to implement. So this is when we started to realise that actually we need to pivot, and we need to start transforming into the modern architecture," he added.

Deloitte Digital specialist director of cloud and engineering Mao Cai explained how the company was engaged in 2017 to help Southern Cross on their digital transformation journey.

“After a series of analysis [of Southern Cross’ IT infrastructure], what we found out is that the organisation is great, the actual problem is there is a 20 or 30-year-old system in a big data centre,” Cai said.

“We had to ask what can be done, what are the possible ways to make the organisation move faster from a technology perspective, to turn software that just gets the job done into an organisation-wide enabler, and then all the microservices journey starts and system organisation and digital transformation.”

“So here we are today, you know, we have a pretty large microservice ecosystem backed by Red Hat OpenShift solutions, with a number of automations."

"Senior developers are happy, business teams are happy with both the flexibility the system offers and the rapid delivery speed the platform team provided.”

Mindset changes a key challenge

Koo spoke of the challenges of digital transformation from a business perspective, noting the shift in mindsets it has required at Southern Cross.

“I think that any transformation is going to take some energy and resilience in approaching it."

"And my experience with this journey so far is...[I would] boil it down to two kind of big rocks that I wanted to lift around mindsets.”

“So for the engineers, I would say that the mindset is actually shifting away from delivering more features into how do you reduce the cognitive load so that you can shift the customer experience sooner – how do you create self-service capability for your end customers.”

“And for management, mindset wise is actually, please create a growth mindset for your teams, because these things are still new, and give that space for the engineers to excel.”

Need for transformation partner critical

Koo said that a key realisation for Southern Cross was that to achieve digital transformation, some of the work needed to outsourced. 

“The other big rock that I had was really around talent, on how we operate."

"New Zealand is a tight labour market, so how do we attract talent to operate in that?

"You know, aspirationally, we want to look at each of our engineers and say you can do everything, but in reality we might not be able to afford it, even if we managed to find them,” Koo said.

"We are still an insurance company at heart, operating as a not-for-profit."

"We actually want to move into cloud first and also want to have security in mind as well."

"So having those criterions for us to choose, we have learned a few lessons...we can't do everything in house, otherwise we'll have a big team to operate in."

"So this is how Deloitte comes into play when they have led the pioneer stage of project for us."