Principles and Practices for Orchestrating Digital Value Chains

Getting outsourcing contracts to comply with Solvency II is not rocket science, but requires a certain amount of attention. Here are some practical guidelines. Where within banks the Basel II implementation projects come to an end, are insurers burning the midnight oil to get Solvency II implemented before the end of 2012. The Solvency II legislation is aimed at improving risk management practices within insurance companies and providing better protection for policyholders. For this purpose, the legislation demands: the insurer to hold enough capital to survive a period of economic hardship (pillar 1), adequate quality of internal controls and governance (Pillar 2) and greater transparency in communication with the regulator and market (Pillar 3). These three topics have been translated into clauses that must be complied with. If the insurer has not outsourced any IT or business processes, it is sufficient for the insurer to translate the legislation into internal ...

In this blog and the next blog I want to share some of my thoughts on government agencies using shared services. More specifically: why do they often function so cumbersome that they make it into the newspapers. What makes shared services within government different Centralization of IT or processes like finance, HR administration offers the ability to rationalize and standardize processes, allowing for lower cost, more consistent quality level and faster decision making. As voters expect their ministries and other government agencies to eat as little as their tax money as possible (especially in these times of economic hardship in the US and Europe), is sharing resources and processes a useful vehicle to achieve that goal. As a result many ambitious objectives have been defined by high ranking government officials. These government officials did however not always realize that ‘sharing resources and processes’ also effects their power base. Where they use to rule their litt...