ÖRAG Rechtsschutzversicherungs AG is the legal protection partner of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. It offers innovative legal protection solutions for the customers of public insurers and savings banks.
The project at a glance
- 17,500 active user registrations without active marketing of the customer portal
- Automated further processing of the master data changed in the self-service portal
- Release frequency increased – from quarterly to weekly
- Significantly less time spent on a release – reduced from 4 hours to 30 minutes
Initial situation
ÖRAG offers comprehensive legal protection packages as a product supplier to public insurers. In the past, communication in the event of a claim was mainly by telephone and post. In order to provide customers with faster and more convenient access to services as part of their legal protection packages in the future, digital self-services relating to legal protection needed to be developed in a cloud-based self-service portal.
Working with codecentric AG, ÖRAG decided to adopt a cloud-based development approach for self-services. The main focus was on the following aspects:
- High level of data security and compliance
- Short development cycles and fast feedback
- Low financial risk and low operating costs
Solution
(Data-)secure cloud use
In an initial phase of the project, IT and data security officers worked with AWS consultants from codecentric AG to develop a cloud policy that defines the framework for the use of managed cloud services provided by AWS, taking into account BaFin requirements. The focus was primarily on the secure storage and retention of data in the cloud and the compliance guidelines of the ÖRAG and BaFin.
All data is processed and stored in encrypted form exclusively in data centers in Europe. Particularly sensitive data is also encrypted end-to-end, so that it can be only decrypted on the customer's end device or in the ÖRAG’s data center
Fast time to market with an agile development team
An agile, cross-functional development team of five was set up to achieve fast time to market. The team was empowered to work with the product owners to implement the MEINRECHT customer portal independently. The primary use of AWS Managed Services enabled a very high development speed, as the team was able to focus 100% on the technical requirements and resulting implementations.
Keeping an eye on compliance and performance
Organizational compliance requirements, such as the separation between operations and development, are met in the chosen process model – without affecting the performance of the development team. The development team is responsible for setting up and operating the environments (DEV & integration). However, it does not have permissions to deploy to the production environment. The development team therefore works closely with the OPS team on the weekly releases.
Releases are handed over to the OPS team in the form of merge requests, are quality-assured and then rolled out to the production environment in a fully automated manner. Fully automating all deployment processes and defining the infrastructure as program code means that all changes to the environments are documented in detail by version management.
Result: self-service portal for customers in the cloud
The MEINRECHT self-service portal went live after a project period of one year with the following functions for end customers:
- Digital damage reporting channel including secure document upload
- Convenient access to all personal documents
- Information on current legal protection agreements
- Self-maintenance of customer master data (e.g. contact and bank data)
- Availability of templates, contact and advisory services, calculators, news on the subject of “law and legal protection” and similar public services.
The portal is available to the user both as a desktop version via a browser and as an iOS and Android app. In future, the self-services will not only be offered in ÖRAG's MEINRECHT portal, but will also be integrated into the self-service portals of public insurers as an API connection.
The project enabled product owners and stakeholders to quickly bring new ideas to the end customer and have them validated, allowing customer feedback to be incorporated into the development process in a timely manner. The experience gained in the use of cross-functional, self-managing teams, in which the focus is on both the speed of development and operational capability, is set to be applied to further projects in the future.
The use of a cross-functional team, the decoupling of the team from the existing company processes and the use of managed services enabled a very fast development speed and time-to-market to be achieved.
Stefan Kur
Head of IT
"MEINRECHT” customer portal – success factors
An interview with Mathias Faas, Head of IT Applications, talks about the success factors in the project and about the added value of cross-functional teams.
(The video is in German language.)
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Service Lead - Cloud Solutions
Other codecentric AG projects
Find out about other successful projects that we have completed with our clients. Perhaps you will find ideas here for a use case in your own organization.
Rolf Felker
Service Lead - Cloud Solutions