
Royal & Sun Alliance (RSA) is one of Canada’s leading property and casualty insurance companies and provides home, car and business insurance through a network of independent brokers nationwide. RSA is Canada’s largest marine insurer and second largest travel insurer. With almost 3,700 employees, it is nationally represented with regional offices and branches coast to coast.

Challenge
The new CIO at RSA wanted to improve productivity and quality of work. Intelliware provided an assessment of the current IT development environment for all its web applications, analyzing both the application architecture and the application development practices and processes.
Solution
Intelliware conducted the assessment by reviewing RSA’s project documentation, technical practices, environment, tools, and source code, and by conducting interviews with staff. Intelliware then analyzed the data and measured the company’s practices against its own and the industry’s best practices. This process resulted in a document outlining the strengths of RSA’s existing practices and applications, identifying gaps to best practices, and recommending improvements with concrete steps for moving forward.
Proof of Concept
To demonstrate that its recommendations would truly deliver business value, Intelliware conducted a Proof of Concept (POC) exercise. The POC would further help RSA’s senior IT management to evaluate the viability of the recommendations outlined in the assessment document within the RSA IT environment.
Results
With the goal of better, faster, cheaper technology solutions for the business, this assessment document proved an integral part of the overall strategic plan to reshape RSA’s IT organization to allow for higher-quality results within shorter timeframes.
At the conclusion of the six-week POC, RSA senior IT management deemed the recommendations both practical and highly beneficial to the business. These recommendations have now been adopted as development standards.