The forces of nature are such that change is inevitable. And so is the case with business and technology. Change happens incrementally every moment. And then there are moments when change is significant as to disrupt the very foundations of existence. Organizations which are adept at not just foreseeing the change but also equipped with the necessary structures to adapt to the change are the ones which eventually survive. Conway’s law suggests that organizations, that design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. Essentially it means that we end up building systems which reflect our organization’s culture and behaviours. And yet, organizational behaviour over a period of time is influenced by the systems that they work with. As time evolves, systems and processes become outdated and are no longer a reflection of the changing market needs. Rigid systems influence rigid processes which in turn results in rigid organizations which are inadequately equipped to respond to the forces that drive change. That in turn impacts organization culture.
Modern organizations need to lay the foundations of their enterprise on systems and platforms which are evolvable at the speed of change. Evolvability, therefore is one of the key tenets of any enterprise foundations. This was the key tenet that the NGIN team resolved to solve for when we undertook our innovation journey. What does it mean to build an evolvable enterprise platform ?
Figure 1 Evolvability
Infosys McCamish NGIN, is built around this core tenet of Evolvability. Evolvability necessitates the ability for systems to absorb new knowledge, adapt and respond with new behaviours at speed and scale. Learnability therefore is not just a core attribute of people, but also of systems. The ability to configure and rollout new products and processes with minimal cost and time to change by the organization is an essential characteristic of an evolvable platform. Another key aspect of evolvable platform is its ability to operate with speed and scale in the organization’s regulatory context. NGIN therefore provides unique features in line with 3 key themes which are essential from a business evolvability perspective.
- Empower users for Speed to Market.
- Amplify Human potential for EQicient Operations.
- Be Geo-aware
Empower users for Speed to Market.
At the heart of NGIN, are several features which enable configurability and extensibility which gives more power to business users, some of which are listed below
- Product configurator which empowers business users to model their products in business-friendly vocabulary as well as configure pluggable behavioural strategies using product templates and a configurable pricing engine.
- Ability for organizations to build their own organization specific templates by extending the OOTB product templates and add to the library.
- Low code-no code configurator using which finance users can set up not just chart of accounts, but also wire custom accounting rules and practices.
These features enable businesses to introduce new insurance product features with minimal IT involvement, eliminating the need for full regression which introduces risks and delays new product launch cycles. Clients can extend OOTB product behaviours, empowering their IT teams to be in charge of speed to market. These business features are enabled by a highly configurable product definition and lifecycle management engine.
Amplify Human potential for ECicient Operations
Business processes from previous era were built around human workflows. This constrains the scalability of the business process thereby impacting both customer and employee experience. Modern business processes need to be built with straight through processing framework at its core. This is also an enabler for Agentic AI based workflows. Amplifying human potential for eQicient operations is one of the core philosophies of NGIN. Several features are built around this theme to run an eQicient insurance operations at scale and improving process TAT, by leveraging a mix of intuitive experience, insights and traditional ML as well as Gen AI techniques. Some of them listed below
- Configurable process rules builder to configure new IGO / process rules to set up transactions for straight through processing (STP).
- An intuitive policy servicing dashboard for operations users, which provides them, in context guided navigation and transaction specific view of the checks that need to be done for the specific transactional context. This provides users all the information and actions needed to complete their tasks. This reduces the need for manual SoP’s and operations user training.
- NGIN’s document AI services for document checks, extraction and validation with user provided / system data with the ability for manual oversight. This enables processes to become truly STP even in processes where manual document verification is needed. e.g. in case of address validation basis aadhar card copy.
- An operations co-pilot driven by GenAI based Agentic system, to simplify policy ageing process for business user testing by providing a simple chatbot which translates human
intent into actionable steps. This improves the productivity of the functional tester during product launch testing.
With its STP First process framework, NGIN gives more power to businesses to define their processes without being limited by IT constraints. They can invest in incrementally automating more and more process rules as per the pace comfortable to both IT and businesses without worrying about the impacts of regression and change management as these new rules can be
wired at product line level and future eQective dates.
NGIN AI Assist framework provides an agentic AI framework to decipher intent and orchestrate various tasks based on the product configurations and state of the policy. AI Assist also provides a robust document classification and automation engine for assisting users in their activities.
Be Geo-aware.
Organizations operate in an evolving regulatory context which is specific to each country. NGIN is built not just for India, but as a geo-aware enterprise business platform with a tax and regulatory engine which can be regionalized to cater to geo-specific requirements. Product and accounting templates, business processes can all be regionalized as per geographic requirements.
Evolvable Tech Foundations
Building business evolvability at scale needs a robust, scalable and adaptable technology foundation. NGIN is built as a modular set of configurable services, using API first, event driven distributed architecture paradigms. These services interact with each other to deliver life insurance and annuities functionalities at scale. NGIN is built as a multi-tenant platform, using modern technology & design paradigms
- Extensible, Layered, Loosely coupled Architecture
o Digital native, modular services, which are configurable, extensibile, swapable, observable and easy to integrate with.
o API First, Event & Domain Driven design services, augmented by persona based intuitive micro-frontend driven UI.
o A rich set of design and extension patterns to ease integration as well as incorporate client implementation specific changes.
o Composable services where foundation services can be leveraged to build higher order services. This helps expand NGIN to the enterprise.
- Rollout philosophy
o A modern secure by design approach to development with a focus on scalability and performance.
o An update philosophy, where every service can update itself using automated deployments. It ensures that client IT teams have to confidence to apply software critical updates on a regular basis which reduces the risk of obsolescence. • Observable and Explainable
o Auditable and Observable transactions with a unique IT-Ops 360 feature which enables both technology teams and non-technical users to understand the transaction’s execution cycle across the system using business transaction
reference numbers. This helps identify any issues / bottlenecks for both AI and non-AI driven activities, and collect actionable inputs rapidly.
o A distributed batch framework using reliable event processing framework which provides visibility at a granular level.
Figure 2 Layered services – Reusable foundations
From a deployment and infrastructure perspective, NGIN supports,
- On cloud & On-premises containerized deployments
- Open source technology, Certified on Enterprise supported products
- SaaS & PaaS models
Although NGIN platform is manifested for Life insurance enterprises, it is a highly modular and configurable system. The reusable foundations can be used to build new modules and enterprise capabilities or to extend it to other lines of business such as Health insurance, Property & Casualty, Mortgages etc. making it a good foundation for building systems for a modern evolvable enterprise.
