Introduction

Insular Life has been in operation for !09 years now and has remained committed in

providing the local market with quality insurance and in recent years investment

products. It has invested significantly in its Information Technology infrastructure both in

its software and hardware side. Such investment is being utilized extensively in the

creation of facility meant to make it easy to transact with the company. The following

systems are an example of this:

1. Agents portal - this Is for the agents so they can look track all the policy that they

are handling, generate report for their output monitoring

2. Customer Portal – this where the policy owner can look at the policy that they

currently own, or status of the investment that they had made

3. Automated Underwriting System – this is system that was introduced to minimize

the manual process in the underwriting process.

4. Group Insurance Portal – this is like customer portal but this one is more geared

to clients of group insurance.

Aside from the applications that the company has invested heavily in developing, it has

also made sure that on the backend of these system is supported with properly rated

connectivity links and high-end servers. These infrastructures are of course

complemented with the proper manpower that handles the following task:

1. System Development Team – this group is incharge of enhancing existing

systems as well as developing new ones that will support the organizations’

strategic goals.
 2. Level 1 support – this group are the one responsible for providing basic support

for internal clients, these supports covers the following:

a. Preparation of employee workstations

b. Installation of the required application on those workstation

c. Setup and configuration of network connectivity

d. Provide basic troubleshooting for both hardware and software that are

provided to the employee.

3. System and Database Administration / Level 2 support – this group handles

servers provisioning, monitoring and maintenance. Their goal is to make sure

that the system backend is always up and running.

All these components are combined with one end in mind, to present to the client a

system that ensure a smooth and pain free transactional experience with the

organization.

A Brief Summary of Mckinsey 7s and Star Model

The McKinsey 7S Model is a framework that is designed to facilitate organizational

effectiveness, and it suggests that there are seven internal factors that must be aligned

and must be reinforced to ensure its success. The 7S Model stipulates that the seven

factors that are classified as "hard" and "soft" elements. Hard elements are identified

and influenced by management, while soft elements are more intangible and influenced

by corporate culture. The hard elements are as follows:

  Strategy - this is the organization's plan for creating and keeping a competitive

edge over its competitors.

 Structure - this how the company organized itself (the hierarchal design of its

division, departments, teams etc.)

 Systems – this refers to the daily routines that the staff performs to get their job

done.

The soft elements are as follows:

 Shared values - these are the core values of the organization, as manifested in

its corporate culture and general work ethic.

 Skills – the leadership style that the organization adopted.

 Style – these are the general capabilities of the employees

 Staff – these are skills and competencies that are possessed by the

organization's employees.

The Star Model framework are composed of design policies that are governed by

management and have the ability to influence the behavior of the employee. These

policies are the tools that the management must expertly used to shape the decisions

and behaviors of their organizations effectively.

Strategy

Strategy dictates the direction of the organization. It is imperative that this must be

taken up first because whatever organizational form we end up with will definitely
involve compromise, and by laying down the strategy first, this will enable us to make

the right compromises.

Structure

Structure refers to the structural policies that will dictate the location of decision-making

power. These policies are divided into four areas:

 Specialization - these are the specialists which will be required to get the work

done and how many of them are required.

 Shape - refers to number of people that must exist at each level of the

organization.

 Distribution of Power – these refers to the form of the organizations power

structure, whether it is centralized or a decentralized in form.

 Departmentalization – determines which departments should be formed.

Processes

Process policies will determine the direction of the flow of information and decisions in

the organization. The choices are between processes which are vertical (planning and

budget related) and lateral (collaboration based).

Rewards

Reward related polices are designed to ensure that the goals of the employee are in-

sync with that of the organization. This motivates the employees to move with the

organization to achieve or meet the strategic goal.

People

These policies will dictate how the organization will recruit, rotated, and train employee

to support the strategic direction of the organization.

Value Discipline – Operational Excellence

Operational excellence is when an organization provides the customers, reliable

products or services at competitive prices and delivered with minimal difficulty or

inconvenience. It is evident from the introduction that the organization’s goal is to

provide the its client and would be client products and services that customer centric as

possible. Ensuring that every transaction done by the client is pain free as possible.

How does all this relate?

Given the organization's value discipline leaning towards the direction of operational

excellence. We can relate this to the Mckinsey 7s model by the hard elements since

the organizations is adopting a strategy of always keeping abreast with the new

technology with systems development and infrastructure setup; the structure of the

division (by having several teams handling different sets of projects) which is setup to

accommodate the large demands for new systems and maintenance of existing one;

and by establish system with which is use to perform the day to day task like

standardize daily monitoring and reports for the systems admins team. For the soft

elements, the shared values of inter team cooperation is definitely encourage to foster

unity; leadership by mentoring is another element that is practiced with in the

organization that has positive effect between team lead and staff relationship;
employees are also routinely given the chance to update key skills via training session

internally or externally, such routine would definitely fall under style and staff. If we are

to compare these to the star framework the difference would be that the star framework

has rewards. And this element too is being practice within the organization via

recognitions (citations) and promotions. All these elements I believe has supported the

operational excellence that the organization has work so hard to maintain.