There are situations where the P&L Head doesn’t understand tech and a CIO doesn’t understand business in depth. But what when both roles merge into one? Does an enterprise function better than the competition in times of crises when both roles are handled by one individual?Sourabh Chatterjee dons both hats of President (P&L Head) and CIO at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance.
According to Chaterjee, having a business understanding and the industry knowledge is very crucial to be a technology leader as it will help in prioritising things in a better manner. “We are not an IT services or a product organisation. Our company’s key focus is to sell insurance and unless the insurance knowledge of that domain is there, it is very difficult sometimes to operate as a CIO. Both my roles complement each other,” he said.
Chatterjee believes that digital and tech have now become a centre stage for every industry which means in the times to come, the role of tech leader is also becoming the focal point for the organisation’s business models and strategies.
“If you look at large organisations globally, the percentage of people with tech skills or background in technology is increasing,” he added.
When asked about whether his understanding of the technology & business created a differentiation for the company during the pandemic, Chatterjee said, “Any crisis according to me is the time to learn. It’s the time to do all the things you have been wanting to do. And that puts an interesting challenge onto the tech leaders: how can digital help in doing more with less (could be budgets, priorities, manpower). This is the time where your understanding of the domain really comes in.”
After the announcement of the lockdown last year, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance had to go through a big change in management in its intermediary business and the bigger question was: how will they adopt digital across the insurance value chain? To handle this situation, there were so many ideas which could be as simple as putting up a portal, an app, automating the processes and similarly doing it for the customers as well.
“Now in all of this prioritising, my knowledge actually helped me and I said if there are intermediaries or agents, if they know us then they would definitely call someone up or figure out what are the available mediums or options to book a policy. However, maybe in the remote places, we know the intermediary doesn’t really know anyone or it’s the other kind of distribution channels in the villages or tier-4 cities which will not know us,” he maintains.
During prioritising all this, Chatterjee thought that while most intermediaries or agents will definitely call the company to know more about available mediums for booking a policy, challenges might occur in villages or smaller cities.
The company then decided to go ahead with an AI-enabled self-service bot platform on which 23 of the services were deployed.
This helped agents and customers to reach out to Bajaj Allianz General Insurance when everything was closed during the lockdown. “The whole thing scaled really well for us, adoption levels went up to 85 percent.”
“This is just one example of how we took a business problem and prioritised the solution based on what we know. Of course, It was a collective initiative executed by the whole team. However, my knowledge of both tech and business helped me in prioritising things in a better way,” Chatterjee avers.
Chatterjee believes that the role of a CIO is not just limited to problem solving at scale but also managing the P&L.
”I have always had this in my mind that if I’m spending X amount of money, that X should result in getting 5X or 10X value into the company. Now that kind of mindset in silos will not happen if I am only managing a cost/profit center role. I see even traditional industries–along with other industries–where IT departments also become profit centres in the future,” he adds.
