"The first eighty percent takes twenty percent of the time, and the last twenty percent takes eighty percent of the time."
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Data modernization is one of the most strategic investments an insurance carrier can make, and one of the most consistently underestimated. The real obstacles aren't just technical. They're systemic: legacy systems built over decades, documentation that doesn't exist, experts who've retired, and millions of policy records with data quality issues buried in every field.
In this on-demand Tech Talk from the Equisoft Accelerate series, UCT President Mike Allee and Product Owner Larry Commerford pull back the curtain on what data transformation actually involves: the complexity, the common failure modes, and the modern approach that changes the outcome.
If your organization is on a path to artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, policy administration system (PAS) modernization, or enterprise data consolidation, this session will help you understand where you are, what's ahead, and how to build a data foundation that lasts.
Our guest panelist
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Larry CommerfordProduct Owner, UCT
Session agenda #
What you'll learn #Your data strategy is foundational to the enterprise #Too often, data modernization is treated as a discrete IT project. But as Mike Allee explains, a carrier's data strategy needs to be anchored in business outcomes, not data for data's sake. Without that foundation, AI and next-generation technology investments are built on sand. The first 80% is not the hard part #UCT's methodology deliberately tackles the most complex, unusual policy types first. The insight: solving the hard cases also solves the easy ones. Teams that start with the straightforward records end up pushing the hardest problems to the end of the timeline, exactly when pressure is highest. Documentation doesn't exist. Experts have retired. And the data is older than you think. #Larry Commerford describes systems that are 30 to 40 years old, with no documentation, no internal champions, and data that defies simple categorization. A gender code field with values like M, F, lowercase variants, spaces, and dashes isn't an edge case, it's the norm. The ability to rapidly discover, codify, and test these variations is what separates a project that finishes from one that doesn't. Business analysts should own the transformation, not developers #When requirements travel from business people to developers and back, things get lost. UCT's approach eliminates that gap: analysts write data maps directly in the Transform tool, which generates the transformation code. The data map becomes the documentation. Changes take minutes, not sprints. | |
About our speakers #Mike Allee — President, UCT #"Your data strategy is foundational to the enterprise — and it needs to be centred around an understanding of what leads to better business outcomes, not just data for data's sake." Mike is a data migration expert with over 20 years of experience designing, implementing, and consolidating insurance administrative and financial systems. As President of UCT, an Equisoft company, he leads a practice focused on helping carriers build the data foundations needed for AI, modernization, and digital transformation. Larry Commerford — Product Owner, UCT #"The requirements for data transformation are almost impossible to get right before the project starts. You have to expect to discover new things, and your tools and methodology need to make that easy, not painful." Larry has spent his career in the world of insurance data transformation, first building UCT's data tools before the company joined the Equisoft family, and now serving as Product Owner for UCT's suite of data transformation solutions. His deep knowledge spans legacy architectures, COBOL-era data stores, and the practical mechanics of moving decades of insurance data from old systems to new ones. Continue exploring: Data migration and insurance modernization #Deepen your knowledge with these related Equisoft resources:
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