The City Plan: An IT Strategy

A visual guide for the improvement of insurance systems. “City planning” is a metaphor that is easy to understand and was created to help employees discuss and interpret a business strategy.

A Strategy Aimed to Improve Infrastructure

The plan aimed to identify current systems through existing architectural, business, and user domains. It established a consensus for improving the underlying technologies and business processes to ensure user needs were met. It did not serve as a single data point for decision-making. We worried that the plan would be followed too literally because it was so simple.

My role included working with management to establish a general concept and help decide how the domains fit into a city metaphor. I then partnered with a co-worker to build out the scoring system by application. I then began to build out and visualize the domain views and working with each domain owner to validate. Finally, I facilitated sessions with the business and technical teams to complete scoring using a dot voting exercise.

Capturing a ‘Health’ Score

To get a pulse on the health of our system, we worked with the business and technical leaders to score each system using three key metrics. For architecture, we used technology, supportability, and adaptability. For the business, we used strategic alignment, business process, and quality. Each system was also measured by a ‘t-shirt’ size (small, medium, or large).

The General Idea

Each domain is comprised of applications, systems, and even business processes. The systems were visualized in a way that ties back to the “City Plan” metaphor. For example, the Customer Service domain was interpreted as the “Shopping District”. It became a shopping mall visually. This visual could then be used to communicate its current health. Then it could be shaped and molded into a future vision that roadmaps where leadership wants to take each domain. They want a view into what they want in the future healthy format.

Capturing User Scoring

I came up with an idea on how to collect user scores which proved to be much more difficult to capture than the business and technology scoring. The work stemmed from a Customer Experience Strategy I developed in partnership with a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. It works as a benchmarking system that incorporates both qualitative and quantitative research using user testing and surveying.

The idea is to complete user testing in a lean and agile way at a certain cadence (quarterly or yearly). Relying solely on the numbers (time on task, usability, difficulty, and confidence) of the user test and not so much on the feedback. It gives a good baseline for pain and opportunity helping to identify what needs the most focus. The test would have to be set up for every application but once set up, the work would be streamlined.

Next Steps

Building on to the “City Plan” metaphor presented new opportunities for the business. Like creating a governance team called the “City Council”. We also used it to start building other strategies like a “Zoning Plan” and “Building Codes” for the architecture teams. As well as a “Materials List”. The new concepts worked as guardrails for standardizing and enhancing our systems.