Special Episode: Technical Debt and how to get out of it, with Bart Patrick of Duck Creek Technologies

Today’s guest is someone with a long history of implementing
technology into the Insurance Market. Bart Patrick, Managing
Director, Europe for Duck Creek really understands the demands of
the industry and the sometimes fractious and strained
relationship with technology that it has had over the years. Well
all of that is changing and this discussion is all about how that
is going to come about. With the advent of cloud computing the
industry finally has an opportunity to leave technology to the
experts and simply get on with doing what it does best – market,
transact and execute innovative insurance deals. In this brave
new world, the software and systems we use are becoming simply a
utility that we can avail ourselves of and don’t have to own and
maintain anymore. What’s more the best platforms can now allow us
to configure them in the way we want to work and let us plug in
any of the tools we want to use to help us do our jobs better and
compete in the marketplace. This is what people are describing as
an ecosystem. But transitioning away from legacy systems that are
in fact many systems all bolted together is not easy,
particularly if we have limited budgets and the massively
important requirement that nothing falls over while we are making
the switch to the new way of working. Technical debt is the
difference between what you should be spending on innovation and
the amount of money you are spending on just keeping the old
inefficient systems running. This talk explains how to get out of
this debt. My role in this discussion is to be the layman with
insurance knowledge and make sure Patrick doesn’t get bogged down
in technical jargon. Luckily Patrick is a great explainer who
knows how to talk to insurance people. I recommend this podcast
to anyone wanting to gain a broad understanding of what our
legacy industry tech problems are, where the future lies and more
importantly, how we are going to get there.


Many thanks to Duck Creek Technologies for their support today.


Find out more at: https://www.duckcreek.com/