Learning Objectives
- Analyze how Allstate’s Claims division replaced project-based annual planning with an operating model built on durable cross-functional teams holding operational decision rights.
- Evaluate Allstate Claims’s four-level decision-rights framework and its leaders’ principle of holding teams accountable for outcomes rather than decisions.
- Compare the design, measure, and perform functions through which each Allstate Claims line of business runs continuous improvement of claims handling.
- Explain why Allstate’s Claims division needed to simplify operations before digital self-service could deliver better customer and employee experiences.
- Evaluate Casualty Center, Allstate Claims’s single-interface hub replacing up to twenty-two adjuster systems, as a model for simplifying frontline work before automating it.
- Explain how Allstate Claims teams’ insistence on customer data over anecdote, supported by embedded data scientists, converted evidence into team autonomy.
Abstract
Senior managers in the claims organization of Allstate's property-casualty insurance business became increasingly aware of the importance and difficulties of implementing new IT-enabled process change over the period 2002 to 2006. The case describes building the managerial and organizational capability for systems development and deployment. This capability effort involved creating a new partnership between IT and the claims business, with full responsibility for systems evolving to the business side. Leadership of the effort was facilitative and evolutionary. The change in capability was being tested in 2006 as the first releases of a major new program of IT-related change was beginning to be installed.
Appropriate for the Following Course(s)
organizational design, decision rights and governance, strategic planning, organizational agility, and organizational culture
THERE IS NO TEACHING NOTE FOR THIS CASE STUDY.