Andrea Hirzle-Yager

[Intro video plays music.]

Good morning, everyone.

Just like the mouse in the beginning, this is what it felt like. I was surrounded by folks who were just like that, afraid of change. And as we embarked on our journey, and as I look at some of the things that we've accomplished over the last year and a half, their mindsets have changed, and they're more like the mouse you saw in the end.

We're not lifting weights or anything yet. But anyway, it's been a really great and exciting journey, and I'm going to share with you some of the stories around that. I want to talk about Allianz first a little bit.

Allianz: where do we come from? Our legacy is that we've always been at the forefront, always part of new things, new ideas, maybe crazy ideas sometimes. But we've always made that possible for people to pursue their dreams.

Back in the day, it was the Titanic. We've learned from that. But we are also already offering drone insurance products, and whatever the next thing will be, we'll be there as well, making that possible.

Some of you may ask, who's Allianz anyway, right? So I brought some numbers to share with you. We're Europe's largest insurance company, present in over 70 countries worldwide, and we've been in business for over 125 years, and would like to remain in business, hopefully, for the next 125 or longer.

Within our company, we employ over 140,000 people. 30% of those work for Allianz Germany, and that's where I am. I'm with Allianz Germany, and within Allianz Germany, I'm responsible, as Gene mentioned, among other things, for the entire operations of our legacy environments, our mainframe, but also the change, problem, incident organization, as well as the portal environment.

Within that portal environment is where things started to happen last year.

Last year, at the beginning of the year, and a similar thing might have happened to some of you, we had our senior executives. They had the idea that they would go take a trip to Silicon Valley, and guess what they came back with? They came back with lots and lots of great ideas of all the things that we had to do within just a few months, of course, to continue to focus more on our customer.

Now, it's not like we hadn't focused on our customer before, but what was different now was that we realized that we need to get closer to the customers in such a way that we really understand what it is that they need, that we can deliver products to them anytime, anywhere, and fast.

They came back with a very specific goal for us, and that was, for each of the business units, we had to develop an application that we would make available on the App Store within the year. That's pretty crazy if you know a large insurance company, to deliver anything that quickly and to deliver something that has a technology as the basis that we had never done before.

So you can imagine that not only our security people, not just IT security but data security, they all said, "Well, it's impossible. Can't be done. No way. Not within a few months. No way, no how."

Despite that, if senior executives tell you to do something, you begin to plan, and you try and figure out maybe what could be some excuses you could come up with why it really isn't possible.

Nevertheless, they hadn't only come back with ideas. They had also gone to see some companies, of course. One of the companies was Pivotal. What we decided was, since Pivotal had some labs in London, that we would at the very least send a few teams to London to learn how to potentially work in a different way, how to do pair programming, how to actually develop a product in a cross-functional team with everybody at the table, so that hopefully we would at least get something done before the end of the year.

But that wasn't good enough for me. I said, "Well, I have been too many times on the other side of that wall where somebody went and did something, and then just before it was really done, it got thrown over the wall to the ops people," which is where I sit. And then it's, "Here, deal with it." Right?

Didn't want to do that again. We had had that with an enterprise service bus product that really wasn't completed all the way, that rollout at the time, and my operations team was left to deal with it. And we had numerous other products where that was the case. So I didn't really want to go down that road again.

Plus, one of the pieces of my strategy for my department is that I don't just want to do legacy. That's important, and it's definitely a critical piece of the puzzle, but I also want my team to be there from the very beginning, at the forefront, at the table, having the discussions as problems come up and as we define and decide how we were going to address the problems and solve the problems.

So there was that. And then there was my experience, 17 years in the United States, where I had lived and worked. And one of the things that had completely inspired me, me being German, was that sense of possibility that I felt when I lived in the States, that really anything was possible.

What I had brought back with me from the U.S. was that sense of possibility. I really wanted to bring that, not just to Germany, but really to Allianz. And so I raised my hand and I said, "All right, I'll take on this project, and we will deliver those apps before the end of the year. We can make this possible."

So how did we do it? What did we have to do?

We had to, of course, create a space for the development teams who were now in London learning how to code with Pivotal in a pair programming type setup. We needed a space for them that they could come back to where they wouldn't be distracted by all of the everyday stuff that they were exposed to today. So no phone, no meetings, none of that stuff.

So we set up a couple of training centers, one in Munich, one in Stuttgart, Germany, for them to be able to move into as soon as their time at Pivotal was over. And we actually completed that in June of 2016. Then we also had the first teams actually move in to those spaces in July of 2016.

And the first products were ready to be put and deployed on our test platform in August of that year. So that means that my team, together with the help of numerous external and internal experts, had created this platform, or at least the test environment of a platform, within light speed.

I have to tell you, this was something that had never been done before at this speed. Usually, it would take us several months to just even get the hardware ordered, let alone set up a platform that could be used.

So how did we do that? We had many challenges along the way, and one of which, I just still recall the sentence that I would hear over and over again, especially from the security folks: "You can't do it. It's not possible. We have all these issues that haven't been resolved."

So when I began to ask the question, "Well, what exactly are the issues?" it became pretty apparent that it wasn't very clear and transparent. One team would ask the other team to do something, but nobody really knew what exactly needed to be done to actually move forward.

So I called the team together, and I made them all literally sit at the same table together: the security folks, the infrastructure folks, the ops folks, the application development team, everybody at the same table.

I actually played them a couple of clips out of the Apollo 13 movie, for those of you who might know it. It was, "Houston, we have a problem here. We can't get this accomplished if you guys don't begin to think differently and actually work together."

And just like Ed Harris dumping all of the stuff on the table, saying, "Here's what we have, and here's what we have to do. You have got to accomplish this goal," we sat at that same table. And you wouldn't believe, it was amazing to see that once they were all sitting there together and actually talking about what it was exactly that needed to be done, so many of the issues disappeared.

Some of the stuff was really just misunderstanding or not really having understood what the person really meant or really needed. Some of the things had to do with the technology. It was all new technology, so people couldn't really know from the get-go what exactly this new technology was capable of. And so some of the security concerns, for example, could just be checked off because the technology was already solving some of those problems.

So certainly, "failure is not an option" for the end goal, and that is an important piece about this particular message. Yes, as you try and get to that end goal, you may fail a few times. And it's better to fail a few times and fail fast on your way to your final goal, but you need to always remember to pursue that final goal. And that's what we did.

With the new way, you may have had that experience yourselves. You have a new idea, you try to convince your colleagues that it's actually a good idea, and not everybody buys into it, right? Even in recent history, we've had some examples where there were new ideas, new things, and people didn't believe it was going to be the next big thing or even a paradigm shift like what we're doing is.

Those naysayers were wrong on this one, weren't they?

So what did it take for us to get there? It certainly took a new way of thinking. It took, for example, for the security people to not just always raise the flag or hold up the stop sign and say, "Well, sorry, can't do this." Right? It really took more than that. It took for them to begin to shift their way of thinking, to begin to understand the new technology, the new way of working, and to also understand that we would love it if they came to the table with some solutions as well, right?

What about the new way of working together? One of the things, as I just mentioned in the example, that's really important is that we understand that we need to sit at the same table and discuss those things together from the very beginning on, so that we don't make mistakes that are not necessary.

A great experience that we had in our training centers that we had just set up: we had the development teams, they had just come back from London. They're all excited. Everything worked really well there. And then they come back, and this is all new. It's not all perfect yet. So you still have that mindset of, well, somebody's got to think this stuff all the way through and give me the perfect solution so I can work with it.

Well, that wasn't the way that it was when they first came back. So one of the things we learned was that each team tended to make similar mistakes. Similar mistakes around not really knowing about the operations piece or not really knowing about what was required for security.

So we began to think about what it would be that would be helpful for them and came up with an end-to-end DevOps concept. Because the "you build it, you run it" really didn't work, or does not work yet, in a company like Allianz, where you have these humongously complex back-end systems. There's no way that the folks in the training centers can understand and manage and solve any problem that may come up with that entire infrastructure on the back end.

So we decided to come up with an end-to-end DevOps concept where we said, okay, we'll have somebody from operations, we'll have somebody from security, and somebody from architecture who's always available to the folks in the training centers. They rotate through the different teams, and they make sure that they talk to each other, that the development teams understand early on what to be careful about, what some of the things are that they need to consider.

And at the same time, the training and development teams talk to the operations and security people so that they know what it is that's being developed in those training centers. And that worked out really well for us.

A new way of leadership, what does that mean? Well, I'm sure some of you have realized already that the way in which leadership and management used to work is not going to work in this new way of doing business, in this new way of doing IT.

We need leaders who coach the teams, who understand the teams, who actually support the teams, who help them develop in ways and learn new things, who are open-minded, and help them along the journey and not be afraid of change.

One of the most critical things that we've realized at Allianz is that the biggest challenge is to get away from that expectation that my manager will not only tell me what to do, but also how to do it. And that's definitely a big shift for us, is that people really need to take responsibility and be the ones. They are the experts. They are the ones who need to figure out how to go about solving the challenges at hand. It's way more fun that way anyway.

But some of the obstacles that we've come across, and I've been noticing this also just looking at my own children, who initially grew up in the American school system and then came to Germany: we have a blame culture. It's unbelievable.

What's the worst thing you can do in school? It's make a mistake, right? You're grilled in front of the class. If you make a mistake, it's horrifying. And in my mind, that is one of the fundamental things that we need to change.

As you can imagine, we have that as the basis, and then we also have an insurance company. And what do insurance companies do? They're all about security and safety, right? So you want to be 150% certain before you raise your hand or open your mouth that what you're going to say is the right thing.

So that is definitely something we have to continue to work on. That's not something that we will change overnight.

We had a couple of examples in this project where just the training center teams, this end-to-end DevOps concept that I told you about. So rather than raise their hand and say, "Hey, ops guys, we really would love to have more of you here. We need you to be present in the training centers," of course, the way in which it was approached was, well, the ops guys are never here. They probably don't even care about what we're doing here, right?

Never mind, we're busy building that platform within a couple of months that usually would have taken us probably two years to build, right?

So that's something that definitely needs to continue to be in our focus: to take out the blame, to realize that we're all here to solve the problem together. It's not the silos. It's not the "we do this and you didn't do that," but it's really doing it together. And not just the team members, but it's interesting to see however management acts and reacts. That's typically how their teams can be experienced as well.

Then we also had lots and lots of rules and regulations, as you can imagine, that we had to overcome, whether it was customer-sensitive data, which of course needs to be taken seriously and needs to be protected properly. And despite that, to try and figure out how we can make use of new technology.

And it turned out it wasn't in spite of, but it was with the help of new technology, if you can only understand it well enough, that we were able to overcome some of the challenges and some of the concerns that our security folks had.

One big issue within the project was also the contract negotiations. I don't know how many of you have had to negotiate contracts where, especially if it has to happen quickly, it's not an easy thing.

So in the end, we'll all make mistakes. It's good to make them early, before we have gone down a road too far. But it always hurts, so we don't want to waste them, but we want to learn from them.

This is one of my favorite slides, actually, because I think it's so critical. And what does it mean? It means that you need top-down support. You need your senior leadership to be on board, to understand what it is you're trying to do as you embark on this journey or as you continue to move forward on this journey.

Because DevOps, as most of you, I'm sure, will know, is not easy. It's well worth it, and it absolutely, in my opinion, should be done, but it's not an easy thing, and it takes a lot of patience.

So if you are busy, if you have to spend all your time trying to explain your business case to your senior executives the whole way, you won't have enough time to really focus on all of the other important stuff. So that's my experience. You need to get that out of the way early and get your senior leadership aligned and make them realize how important it is and why.

If that hasn't happened in your particular case, then I would recommend you start small and really get a few good examples that you can use to convince your top leadership to get them on board.

But that's not all. I think it's also important, of course, to get your teams to understand and to follow along and to actually actively live what we're talking about here because you alone won't be able to do it.

So it's a cultural change. It's definitely a paradigm shift, in my opinion. So it takes both the top-down and the bottom-up.

And DevOps is not just an IT thing. In many organizations, it starts in IT because we realize how critical it is and what a big difference it makes. But you need to have your HR people on board.

I don't know how many of you have had the challenge of trying to find talent, trying to find the right people with the right mindset to help you move along on this journey. And if you don't have your entire organization behind you, ideally, it makes it that much more challenging. So you certainly need to have the entire organization behind this initiative.

So what did we accomplish?

In September of 2016, we actually launched our first app, believe it or not. Two more apps were deployed in November and December of last year, and those were actually really cool apps, I think.

One was the My Allianz app, which is an app for people who obviously have Allianz insurance, and from your handheld device, it lets you access your contracts so you can take a look at them. You can check different things, whatever you want to do.

Another really cool app is the app that lets you take pictures if you had an accident, which hopefully you won't. But if you did, in the past, it would take a very long time to get your claims adjusted. So here now with this app, what you can do is you take pictures with your smartphone, and you upload them through the app, and you send them in. And within a matter of minutes, you get back a proposal of what the damage was and how much the company will reimburse you for.

If you want to take the immediate payment option, it'll get transferred directly into your bank account. Or, if not, then there is contact information for your particular agent that you can call and talk to about it further. Gives you some options for repair shops and things like that as well. So that one I thought was a really cool one.

Then, for the health insurance app that was created, one of the really cool things is that now you no longer have to keep all of your paperwork and the hard copies and send them in to get reimbursed for your claims. But you can just take pictures, upload them, and get paid that way directly to your bank account.

So a few really, really cool apps, and obviously we're continuing to work to improve them. But those were the first ones, and that crazy goal that was set at the beginning of the year that everybody said, "There's no way," we made it possible by working together really closely and by believing that anything was possible.

For 2017, we have now, with all of these results, of course, been asked to take the journey further, one step further, and we're going into the cloud. So an insurance company like Allianz going into the cloud, here's another crazy project. But that's what we're doing.

We have put together a team. We really have looked at all of the lessons that we've learned out of the project from last year, created a cross-functional team to create and set up and define this new environment for more app development, for some of our legacy environments to be moved into and leverage the new technology.

And my team has been asked to really lead the initiative and also to create a central platform as a service team. So I can say that we were successful. It wasn't always easy. We learned a lot, and it was a lot of fun to embark on this journey.

And here's one of my favorite quotes from Mr. Atkinson: "If I didn't know it couldn't be done, that's why I was able to do it."

So since things aren't easy, and these things are really challenging endeavors, in my experience, it's really important to always remember that anything's possible, and you just have to keep taking a step at a time and moving toward that goal.

And the questions that I had always asked myself: what is my source of energy? I shared with you earlier that anything's possible, and that sense of possibility, to bring that into my organization. And how can I create that? Those are the questions I ask myself.

And if you want to take on the challenge, just taking this as your homework, ask yourself those questions and see what you come up with.

Thank you.