Experimenting With New Ideas; Discarding Those That Don't Scale Up

Sourabh Chatterjee, head – Digital & Technology at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, shares the digital transformation plan of the company:

Manoj Agrawal: What are the lessons from digital transformation progress in 2017?

Sourabh Chatterjee: At Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, we are on a 3-year transformation journey, 2016-17 being the first year. We have divided our journey into 3 parts – run, transform and innovate - and are replacing the building blocks one by one by using technology. We are working with start-ups who come up with various ideas, however we discontinue working on ideas which don’t scale up. There are some failures, when an idea with a big business promise may not scale up with desired business benefits.

Digital is an overused word that brings lot of expectations from IT to deliver quickly. I feel that not all point solutions scale up since they are not enterprise grade. For instance, our chatbot BOING is such a huge success that it has now become a channel in itself and also a challenge for us to integrate it with entire in the organization. Any huge success creates a new challenge. Start-ups need to prepare for enterprise grade solutions.

What kind of plans are there for 2018?