When the so-called Web 2.0 came to the scene at the beginning of the 2000s and the first iPhone was introduced in 2007, no one could imagine what would emerge from these and following technologies.

Really nobody? Three industries were able to get a first impression of the upcoming revolution much earlier – booksellers and retailers with the launch of amazon.com in 1995 and the music industry with the presentation of Apple's iTunes in 2001. Today, digitization is revolutionizing the way companies of almost every industry do business, design their processes, and interact with their customers. Those who do not transform and build innovative digital business models today run the risk of becoming victims of a digital disruption in their industry.

This also applies to the insurance industry and as you know, we have given ourselves the ambition to become “Digital by Default” as one of the 5 objectives of our Renewal Agenda. Without at least a basic understanding of the technical and architectural fundamentals in all business areas and all organizational levels, the digital transformation cannot be mastered.

When that knowledge is spread across the organization, it will enable the efficient discussion of existing and upcoming projects, the provision of useful feedback speeding up development and the evaluation of trends. That's why being IT and technology literate quickly becomes a game changer for those who want to successfully master the digital transformation. And by the way, it's also more fun to be able to talk to the IT department on a level playing field.

Since the early 2000s, the jolts of digitization have been pervading the entire economy and changed the landscape completely. Until the mid-2000s, utility companies dominated and were the most valued companies worldwide. Just ten years later, five technology-focused companies took over this ranking – Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.

For decades, the business models of many economic bedrocks worked perfectly and have cemented their position in their respective industries. But the ranking below and the sheer dominance of the so called GAFA companies (Microsoft does not always get mentioned) in almost any realm prove the strength of technology-enabled and digital business models – and this revolution will also reach the insurance business.

For global insurers, digital transformation and disruptive innovation have developed from vague futuristic concepts into relevant business opportunities, addressing the requirements posed by significantly changed customer behavior. A customer who shops at Amazon and has the products he ordered at his fingertips often within less than 24 hours, will not have the patience to wait for a response from his insurer for days or even weeks. There is a wide array of digital opportunities across all steps of the value chain, for every product, region and distribution segment.

Digitization paves the way for higher profitability, lower costs and at the same time more time for the customer and a stronger customer loyalty and personalization. Companies must quickly define and, even more important, consequently implement sustainable strategies for digitization and the development of digital business models. We are already well on the way, but need to keep our innovative strength and continue to increase our efforts and pace.

The quote "Software is eating the world" comes from IT and Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen. As examples, he cited various digital companies that have revolutionized traditional markets – Amazon the book and retail business; Netflix and videogame makers the entertainment sector; and Apple's iTunes, Spotify and Pandora the music industry; not to mention photography and the publishing industry.

Also in the insurance sector, a large number of startups is looking to shake up the industry with innovative ideas. Examples are digital "personal insurance assistants" enabling users to manage their insurance policies, Telematics-enabled "pay-as-you-go" car insurance, or telehealth platforms that can reduce time and efforts for medical treatments and have a positive effect on prices for health insurance.

And there is no end in sight – the next stage of the revolution is already here: Artificial intelligence is getting ready to eat software. Historically, software applications have mostly been designed to automate a specific set of processes. Based on artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, upcoming applications will also be able to learn by themselves in order to become more and more personalized and relevant to the user. Leveraging the knowledge of user´s behavior and preferences plus a huge amount of contextual information, next generation applications will map the right content and resources to the user in a seamless way. They will also be able to make more helpful suggestions.

This will have huge impact on productivity, and it will provide galaxies of possibilities. For many, that might sound like science fiction, but it´s just around the corner. A quote by the physicist Albert Allen Bartlett aptly describes how difficult it is to grasp upcoming developments of such dimensions: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

We have closely monitored what is going on in the digital transformation of our and other industries. Based on these findings, in 2016 we defined a Single Digital Agenda. The agenda is divided into five strategic pillars. The first one is our Global Digital Factory. In the GDF we conduct the end-to-end transformation and digitization of customer journeys and thereby reshape the customer experience. The work on the journeys always happens in international and cross-functional teams where experts from Group and OEs co-create and collaborate. Hence, we also work on stronger collaboration across the group and avoid reinventing the wheel multiple times. This helps us in becoming simpler and obviously we also have productivity increases in mind.

As ecosystems and platforms are the dominating way to create unassailable leadership positions, with Global Digital Partnerships we aim to become a key player of choice and single point of contact for partnering with other companies in various relevant ecosystems including Smart Home, Connected Health, Mobility and more.

The third element of the agenda is called “Direct & Digital Pure Play” What does that mean? We want to develop, implement and scale-up digital only services and offerings plus fully digital distribution models.

Allianz X is the fourth pillar of our digital agenda. Through Allianz X, we are connected to the global start-up ecosystem. We are investing in digital growth companies that are part of the ecosystems related to insurance and our business model. But of course we have to keep in mind – investing in these startups is venture capital business.

Last but not least the fifth pillar – Advanced Business Analytics. This team supports the Allianz Group with use cases around big data and artificial intelligence to be run in the different OEs and regions. Analytics help us to enhance and transform the entire value chain.

This unified digital agenda allows us to shape and execute the digital transformation of the Allianz Group and to create new business.

Coming back to companies thriving in the digital world, they are all characterized by some common features that we should have a closer look at and that we should learn from. They have a great piece of technology, they are able to scale it up, and they hire the right people to bring it forward. So it's technology, scalability & skills. That's it, that's the recipe for success?

No, there is another essential ingredient – networking. Via platforms or ecosystems all these companies have generated powerful network effects significantly increasing their reach in terms of customers and suppliers.

Technology, scalability & skills plus networking – these are the building blocks to survive and prosper in the rapidly evolving digital world. We need to master all components to transform successfully, and we need to accept that the most challenging, time consuming, and resource intensive tasks involve our IT landscape.

On top of that we need to fully understand that size is no longer the only key asset these days – it´s more the speed of implementation, which is crucial to the success of any digital transformation initiative.

Economies of scale – sounds complicated at first glance. But it's easy, just think about the platform strategy of car makers enabling them to build various models based on one chassis in a very cost-effective manner. If you manage to scale fixed costs over large product volumes, spread them across more product categories and find new revenue streams to lower them – that’s what you call economies of scale.

This concept also applies to our group solutions and our platform strategy. We already have a number of such solutions – our Allianz Business System (ABS) is one, our Telematics/IoT platform another. In total we developed no less than 20 group solutions for reuse by various OEs.

However, the success of the concept clearly depends on the volume and the degree of customization. We need to understand that the development costs of such a solution only pay off if as many regions and OEs as possible implement the solution and migrate the existing contracts in a timely manner. In addition, the scope of customization should be limited to what is actually essential.

Network economies are very compelling – it is all about connections between customers, suppliers and partners. Again, let´s take Amazon as an example. As they don´t have physical stores, their lower operational cost allow for lower prices. Combined with a premium customer experience, traffic is increasing, attracting more sellers, broadening the selection, pulling more customers – to be continued. The growing network works like a growth turbine.

We are convinced that this principle will also work in the insurance sector. As a result, we identified five ecosystems we want to play an active role in: Mobility, Connected Property, InsurTech & Wealth, Data Intelligence & Cybersecurity, and Connected Health.

Even when we might not be the leading player in all of them – not playing a role in one of them is not an option. We will still be able to benefit from the network effects, leveraging the size of our customer base or the customer base of our partners in the respective ecosystem as a value driver.

To make the digital transformation a success, technology, economies of scale, skill & scope and network effects are key. And again, speed is of essence – a company has economies of speed in its market if it can execute faster than its competitors.

To translate all this into a Group Strategy we defined our priorities for the upcoming horizons – it is a huge challenge as we have to master three tasks at the same time. First, we need to optimize our current business to keep our leadership in technical excellence and to generate investment capital . Second, we need to transform and upgrade our current business model in order to create higher customer value and make it future-proof. Third, we aim at systematically building new (legacy-free) businesses for future digitally-enabled ecosystems.

A key task within the strategy is the shift from a primarily “push“-oriented to a “push-andpull” business model. In the case of push strategies, the consumer has a latent need that can be transformed into a conscious need through marketing measures such as aggressive pricing or personal selling via retailers or agents. Selling insurance policies to customers via intermediaries has traditionally had many elements of such a push model. In the pull approach, the company aims to strategically align its offer to consumer demand. It builds an image and increases brand awareness. The pull strategy targets the consumer who is ready and willing to buy a product.

The combined “push & pull” model is capable of delivering simple-yet-exceptional products and services to customers across multiple channels.

Incorrect assumptions about another‘s situation and motivations are not only a problem between individual colleagues in a workplace, but can also be a problem among whole departments in companies. A classic in this respect is the relationship between business and IT functions.

The objectives and requirements of both partners often seem completely contrary, and a mutual understanding of the core problem they are trying to solve together can get lost in their differences.

To lead projects to success, a team must have a shared understanding of the project’s value drivers. Shared understanding of value between different departments might have not seemed so important in the past (although, in fact, it was) – but for today’s cross-functional teams delivering modern projects in an agile manner it is crucial for success.

How can companies achieve this shared understanding of value? Of course they could invest in strategy meetings and co-develop a number of concepts. But it starts more simply and by being more practical – it starts with treating each other with respect, with being open to each other’s experience and creativity, and with joining forces to develop solutions that work in all aspects.

Especially in today's technology-driven time, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that the introduction of new IT technologies creates value.

However, this is not true – value arises solely through the strategic optimization of business processes. Companies must first define which processes are to be optimized for which goal. The IT department already plays an important role in this phase of the feasibility analysis.

Even when IT technology alone can barely increase value, it´s the essential groundwork for any business today. Let´s have a look at its components, specifically the three layers of infrastructure, applications and data.

Infrastructure – the hidden stuff

The term infrastructure (from Latin ”infra“ – below and ”structura“ – assembly) is, in a figurative sense, a substructure. In IT, infrastructure is all the boxes, server racks, cables and blinking lights. For the business departments, it is mostly the hidden stuff they leverage in their daily work. Infrastructure does not increase value – but done poorly, it can cause significant losses.

Applications – touchpoint of technology and business

Applications are the second level – it is the software where technology touches business processes. Compared to ten years ago, software has completely changed. It is no longer a monolithic application that is installed on all workstations and is updated every 6-9 months. Modern software runs in or comes from the cloud and is updated at much shorter intervals.

Applications are the level enabling you to optimize your business processes and where the customer experience comes into play. We all know the difference between well and poorly designed applications.

Well-designed applications are a pleasure to use and let us quickly achieve the desired results. Poorly designed applications are the contrary. We all know examples of both.

By the way, design in this context does not only mean pure aesthetics, but also the comfort and ease of use in particular.

Data – the new oil

Finally there are data – often called ”the new oil“. Data are the lifeblood of everything we do, the basis of all our business processes.

Data quality is everything. Bad data – data is wrong, incomplete or double – slows down processes, blocks successful completion of processes and often leads to a negative customer experience, not to mention the impact bad data can have on strategic decisions. The importance of data, accurate data, will continue to increase in the age of artificial intelligence.

It is important to mention that the subsequent correction of existing data is always a complex and therefore costly matter. When it comes to data, the First Time Right principle must, so to speak, become part of our DNA.

Every day, managers make decisions. Most of them will impact daily operations or mid-term planning. However, some of them will have a broader, if not company-wide and/or a long-term impact, and should be considered as strategically relevant. It is obvious that many decisions that the IT department has to make are of strategic importance.

It is also obvious that such decisions should not be made “from the hip”. This is where IT governance comes in. IT governance provides a formal framework ensuring that IT decisions provide value to the business.

Having good ideas and visions for innovation and pouring them into a strategy is one thing, but successfully executing this strategy is another. Fortunately, three frameworks provide guidance.

Operating Model provides the logic for how things will work together

The definition of an operating model provides the draft for the implementation of an IT strategy – it converts the intentions of the defined strategy into operational capabilities.

It helps to maintain clear roles and responsibilities as well as the interaction between IT and business teams, in order to avoid operational inefficiencies and to control operating risks.

Defining an operating model includes an assessment of the current state, agreement on the desired future state, as well as the definition of design principles describing how the company wants to achieve its strategic goals.

A well-defined operating model helps to determine if the project is going the right way.

Architecture should be lasagna and ravioli

IT systems that have grown over decades are usually characterized by a very complex architecture, which is called "spaghetti architecture". This is because everything is somehow intertwined and interdependent.

As a result, the IT systems are difficult and complex to manage, particularly with regard to high availability and security. When it comes to digital transformation, architecture of this kind is one of the biggest hurdles.

To keep the pasta analogy – modern IT architecture should be a combination of lasagna and ravioli. Lasagna represents a layer-based approach, where it is easy to see which layer is doing what. Ravioli stands for a modular approach that makes it easy to connect or replace systems as needed.

Such an IT environment enables fast reaction to changing requirements as well as the implementation of new business models.

Risk Management helps to secure the project

The implementation of an IT strategy involves a number of risks – technical aspects, requirements that change during implementation and, of course, rising costs.

This is where IT Risk Management comes into play, aiming to manage the risks that come with the ownership, involvement, operation, influence, adoption and use of IT systems. In IT, a risk is defined as the product of the asset value, the system's vulnerability to that risk and the threat it poses for the organization.

Digital transformation is changing companies in a radical way. Good change management is essential, as is transparency to make the processes understandable to all stakeholders involved.

This is where the business roles come in, as changing the organizations is their responsibility. They “book the trip”, they define, what they need to achieve their goals.

Decision transparency together with the collaboration of all those involved in a project allows companies to achieve higher quality when implementing new business models.

In today's business world, mastering digital transformation well is essential. Suddenly, traditional companies need to become digital masters in a relatively short time period.

Becoming a digital master does not mean investing in technology – it is not mobile, artificial intelligence or big data. First and foremost, there are two much more important things: a change to an agile mindset and a clear focus on optimum customer experience. Digital masters are building up the ability to fundamentally rethink how their companies should work – and then they plug in the right technology to make the right changes happen.

Digital capabilities consist of understanding customer experience as well as operational processes and innovative business models. However, this is just half the truth; as with every revolutionary change, digital transformation requires strong leadership capabilities. A strong vision supported by engagement and governance are essential in this respect.

One of the first electric data processing machines, not to call it a computer, was named after its inventor, Herman Hollerith. Developed in the late 1880s, the machine laid the foundation for a company we all know as IBM today.

One of the first customers of the Hollerith machine was an insurance company –Prudential Financial in North America. So, our industry has really a long-lasting information technology history.

Since then, we always used IT to optimize and automate tasks –to do them more quickly and more efficiently, with highest accuracy, and always cheaper.

Of course, the systems soon turned out to be mission-critical – but at the end of the day, it rarely mattered where we got these systems and services from. It was just key that they ran with highest possible availability and efficiency. They never sold us any insurance contract.

That´s why IT systems were trapped in the parity box – their importance was and is high, but they were never our unique selling proposition in the competitive landscape.

That´s a thing of the past!

The role and relevance of IT has changed dramatically. Almost all new business models emerging today are based on IT –the Internet of Things, telematics, health sensors in smartphones and smart watches, home automation systems – all these kinds of things.

The new markets we enter, the new business models we develop now and in the future – they all are enabled by IT.

IT is no longer in that parity box. IT has become a key differentiator, enabling us to be ahead of the curve.

That´s why it is so important for everyone in the company to get to know the basic concepts and opportunities of modern information technology.

„Our architecture interweaves batch and on-line workload on the same compute cloud thanks to stateless micro services components that provide horizontal scalability for high availability and fault tolerance.“

This is IT gobbledygook at its best –it´s the kind of special language any expert creates or adopts over time. That´s the reason business people often do not understand IT architects – and vice versa.

Like any language, also the language of IT consists of vocabulary and grammar. The vocabulary of IT are the technical components and building blocks that are named in fancy jargon-heavy terms – as with other modern languages, these develop over time and are somewhat always subject to change.

So, let's focus on the grammar! As with any language, becoming proficient in the grammar is the most important part. The grammar of IT is the way we think and structure IT and the concepts we apply to make decisions and trade-offs about IT. And this is actually not that different from the way business people think and structure their decisions about business models and strategies. It´s all about structures, dependencies, how much you can layer, integrate or separate.

Because of the rapid evolution in information technology, even non-IT people need to develop a basic understanding for IT. And when we all develop the understanding for our counterparts in the various departments, we can speed-up things significantly.

When communicating with your IT department, it helps a lot to develop a basic understanding of the thinking of an IT architect –the grammar again.

Five interesting concepts help us to do so :

Architecture sells you options

Why do you need IT architecture and what makes a good one? Quite simply put, a good IT architecture is one that makes your systems future proof. And being future proof means having the possibility to change and adapt them for future events that no one can foresee today. Hence, a good IT architecture needs to provide you short, mid and long term options and choices, you can take or not take in the future. In that respect it’s not too different from the option concept we know from financial markets!

We will talk about elastic systems and infrastructure later on that allow you to add server capacity as you go along –this is exactly what we mean by options! Optionality is vital as today´s digital world is a lot less predictable than the past.

Feedback drives development

What else helps to navigate an unpredictable environment? Instead of making big moves that take a long time from inception to implementation, you take smaller steps, you get feedback and you correct the course as needed. It´s the build, measure, learn philosophy where feedback plays a crucial role to improve and make progress on an ongoing basis.

Finding the right model

Our business is very complicated, and so is our IT. The way we think and display our thinking is to use models –i.e. concepts about reality. Think about maps for example as a useful model to help you orientating yourself and finding your way. They, too, are only a concept of the real world –or have you ever seen red roads or measured the distance between Europe and Asia in centimeters? The tricky question when you talk to your IT architect is to find a useful model. It´s all about knowing the question you have or the decision you want to make – be it why do changes cost so much or how to make the system more scalable. Once the IT team knows what you aim for, we can create the proper model helping you to answer it.

Simplify to the max

Another key way to deal with complexity is simplifying by using abstraction. Take the power socket as the perfect example – its simplicity perfectly covers the extreme complexity behind the process steps, technologies and stakeholders involved in the course of delivering power into our homes. That is, what IT (architecture) needs to deliver.

Qualities and trade-offs coexist

IT systems are like normal life – you just cannot have everything and need to live with tradeoffs. When you change something here, something might move over there. IT teams need to take the interaction of all components into account to ensure safe operation and operability of the systems in all situations. The consequences of a sensible business decision on one end might not be beneficial across departments, company-wide and globally. This can be frustrating or seem restrictive at first sight. But this is the dialogue we should have between IT and business – discussing goals, reasons and impacts, enabling us to find compromises making the pieces fit together.

In the past, the life of IT architects was much easier than it is today. The systems were build as fortresses, according to the motto "my home is my castle".

Sure, these systems were robust -at least until, for example, attackers got better and better. And they were often a pain when it came to responding to new demands in a highly flexible manner.

In today's fast-paced and much more open world of information technology, IT architects need to pave the way between two deeply legitimate, yet seemingly contradictory interests: the protection and the openness of systems.

In Internet-driven environments, systems need to be failure tolerant to a certain extent. We call them “resilient”. The philosophy is that it´s ok when something fails, as systems have “built-in” mechanisms capable of coping with it, e.g. having a redundant second system in place that takes over when the first one breaks. That's great in principle, but actually we are still worried way too often and love our fortresses.

You can push it even more to the extreme -according to a new philosophy called "antifragile". This means you actively inject failures into your systems to make them better – the more failure the stronger the systems. It sounds weird, but it´s actually calming and a liberating state once you reach it. You can compare it to the vaccine where your doctor injects attenuated pathogens to make your body antifragile.

Building antifragile systems is admittedly not part of our DNA yet –but we’ll hopefully get there!

What is the value of the most beautiful IT infrastructure without powerful software? It´s zero –only software applications unlock the business value of IT.

IT people actually think in two phases, and that´s almost two different worlds. First, we design software taking into account user requirements and aligning them with technical aspects including our architectural target picture, the development platform and the tools we have at hand (design time).

Once the software is built we take care of its deployment and smooth operation. That includes feedback cycles enabling us to further improve the application (run time).

Let`s start with the design time.

Like many other industries, our business is undergoing a digital transformation that, simply put, turns everything upside down. Existing, not to say legacy, processes today have limited relevance, and this also applies to the development of software.

The bottom line is that it has to become more efficient.

The development of software has to become more efficent in the days of digital transformation.

Previously common planning processes of software projects are no longer valid. Projects were often planned linearly – you might have heard about “waterfall” in that regard. By the time a piece of software was delivered, it could very well be that the customer requirements had changed and it was not needed anymore in the way it was originally planned.

There are several key factors for the timely development of high quality software using existing resources. Compared to releasing big software changes only every couple of months in the past, today we try to deploy smaller changes to our applications almost continuously, which is part of the “DevOps” philosophy. Thereby, we also try to be as lean as possible and to limit our code inventory –having unused inventory lying around for months is costly –as you know from other industries. Probably the most important trend is “agile”, aiming for more transparency, flexibility and faster deployment of the systems created.

Often, other departments demand agile development from the IT department, but that is just half the truth. The agile approach needs to involve both the IT and the business team – the latter relies on the IT to develop a decent application while the IT team trusts business to prioritize by business value.

Businesses today need to operate almost at speed of light while embracing and leveraging change to remain competitive. As part of the digital transformation, companies are seeking to "industrialize", i.e. to standardize, institutionalize and accelerate digital assets and processes.

This trend also applies to software development and was quickly understood and applied by digital players like Google or Amazon, enabling them to develop their solutions incredibly fast without compromising quality.

Industrialization does not apply to the creative part of software development, the actual coding of the application, which is not easily possible to standardize and automate.

Industrialization is needed when it comes to software testing and quality assurance, it also comes into play when software is compiled or deployed.

In a process called “continuous integration”, the code coming from various developers gets compiled and enters an automated testing cycle, making sure the quality of the application increases quickly. The same thinking applies for the “continuous delivery” process, ideally providing end-to-end automation of the complete task.

All this is made possible by our own Agile Delivery Platform, an integrated application development, deployment, and run-time platform that speeds up software delivery while maintaining high quality. It’s built on the six core principles of confidence, repeatability, security, reusability, elasticity, and feedback.

Properly implemented and executed, this strategy is an important step for our company to secure our digital competitiveness.

We have seen in the last chapter how software is developed and deployed today. But what happens once the software is running? Let´s look at the Internet to get a better understanding.

Each and every question by a customer we receive via the Internet triggers a complex background process that takes just fractions of seconds. Behind the scenes a life of a web requests starts.

The request coded in the so-called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) travels through operating systems, hardware and networks, and special components translate the http into application language and data formats. The request is processed and the result is sent the same way to the customer's computer.

From an IT point of view, a customer´s question consists of a number of such requests. All this doesn´t get any easier by the fact that a large number of customers interact simultaneously with our systems.

HTML – standardizing beauty

What makes a website look nice and beautiful? It´s Hypertext Markup Language or HTML, a special language for creating web pages and web applications. Together with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript, it´s a cornerstone technology for the World Wide Web, paving the way to the limitless scalability of the Internet (if you want to see it, just open a web page and type CTRL+U). This very simple example of a common standard used world wide shows you the power of standardization –especially when it comes to IT.

The Load Balancer –the IT fairness fanatic

In a high-traffic IT environment, you need “someone” who distributes the workload fairly and evenly across servers, and the load balancer is that fairness fanatic.

We need to understand that in a data center, there is not just one server. There are usually thousands of them. When a request comes in – be it a “get the book to my shopping cart” or the click on an ad –the load balancer checks which server is available, and idle, and then pushes the request to that server. So the load balancer aims to optimize the usage of resources, maximize throughput and minimize response time. It´s your and our customers’ friend in the background.

Once we have a perfectly running website, what do we have to do in order to manage increasing demands and requirements?

One of the solutions is elastic systems and infrastructure!

In the past you had, let’s say, three servers in your local data center. When you needed to scale, you just bought another one. This approach is certainly valid when you needed larger server capacities on a continuous basis. But what about capacity peaks and lows, as we see them in our yearly contract renewal season, for example? As money and time are scarce resources, you will certainly agree that this doesn’t seem like the best solution.

Today, cloud-based autoscaling is the magic word. When the IT environment hits its limits – and that can happen daily in an online-driven world –it scales automatically by adding more servers for which you pay on demand. Isn´t that great?

A downside is that diversity kills autoscaling. It just cannot work when we have too many individual applications and systems each needing individual servers – we need more harmonization to enable smooth and trouble-free scalability.

As we are a international company, we also need to think about the right mix between global and local to stay competitive.

It sounds like a paradox –being restrictive creates more room for innovation. In terms of IT infrastructure and platforms (ok, not just here), a clear definition of global structures and standards enables and encourages creativity and innovation on the frontend and often local level.

In a global company like ours, the business value is clearly on the local customization level. With this in mind, keeping the flexibility for innovation on a local level is essential while having globally standardized and harmonized infrastructure and platforms in place. This is why we have a dedicated and defined Allianz platform strategy.

Last but not least – let’s look at data centers.

Some things in (business) life are taken for granted so you only notice them the moment they are not working perfectly.

Without any doubt, this also applies to data centers.

For good reason, you want to access your everyday applications and data without having to worry about how they are provided. It's like the Internet these days – you simply expect that it is available –anytime, anywhere. And the IT people take care of it.

In the modern world, a data center is the electronic brain of our company.

As part of the DCC (Data Center Consolidation) program, we are consolidating our 140 data centers to six strategic locations world-wide –in special buildings offering every conceivable security from secure power supply via cooling and fire protection to systems for automated backup of data and continuous monitoring.

The data centers also provide the backbone of our global network –just another system you only notice in case of failure or outage.