Role of Digital Channel in the changing Insurance marketplace in India

I worked on a live project with Pricewaterhouse Coopers on the Role of Digital Channel in the changing Insurance marketplace in India. Below is my submission for the initial participant selection.


Insurance is a US $60.5 billion market with CAGR of over 25%. Considering this with the fact that Insurance penetration in India ranks outside the top 100 nations and is lowest amongst the BRIC nations, no wonder there has been a huge entry of private players with 12 licenses issued since 2009, 8 in the life insurance sector and 4 in the non-life insurance sector.

This leaves a lot of potential for growth in the Insurance sector in the Indian market:

• Although Life Insurance Penetration (4%) is close to World average (4.4%), General insurance business (0.6%) yet to be penetrated as world average is 5 times higher (3.1%) 
• Economic growth in country is leading to increase in income levels which would propel life insurance growth. 
• Almost 50% of Indian population is below 25 years of age. 
• India’s growing middle class is a target of several international insurance players 

Widespread digital channel penetration in India provides an irreplaceable medium to connect and communicate. India ranks 4th in terms of internet users and 2nd in terms of mobile phone users in the world. Also the target middle class consumer is fairly active on such forums.

Role of Digital Channel in the changing Insurance marketplace in India

Mobile:

• Regular SMS service for educating consumers, offering new schemes and discounts about the benefits of Insurance; the service should be valuable for the users so that they are motivated to opt-in.
• GPRS games to create consumer awareness about the Insurance products and their benefits. Each game will have an insurance service attached to it.
• Tie ups with service providers to provide Value Added Services and increase penetration
• Provision of latest updates on insurance marketplace in regional languages through Value Added Services of service providers in the area. People can be made aware of new trends of insuring Events like IPL, movies and terror damages
• Provision of Mobile banking for premium payments, quick provision of the insurance approval and claim

Internet

• Develop micro-sites for involvement with consumers.
• Develop socially intriguing promotions which have the potential to go viral on sites like Facebook, YouTube, etc.
• Discussion forum on sites where people can participate and air their views.
• Creation of groups specific to insurance marketplace and initiating discussions on it.
• Advertise using Adwords on the search engines over Internet; use flash and interactive ads targeting different user groups; advertise on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

E-Governance: Issues and Challenges in India

I have taken up E-Governance as a Course of Independent Study and have been studying the various projects being undertaken by the Government of India under NeGP (National E-Governance Plan) along with evaluation of the impact assessment parameters for these projects. I am also working on a paper elaborating the issues and challenges being faced by the E-Governance initiatives in India. Below is an abstract for the paper.

 “E-Governnce: Issues and Challenges in India”

The E-Governance implementation and acceptance has achieved tremendous growth since its inception in India. Several E-Governance projects have been initiated globally across countries and have been successful in introducing transparency within the system. India however has still not been able to get the due benefits of its E-governance projects even though a huge amount of investment has been done in this direction. There still exist several roadblocks to the successful execution of these projects. The paper will primarily focus on the various issues and challenges being faced by the E-Governance projects in the Indian perspective. The issues will include challenges like E-Governance projects planning, government process re-engineering, security issues, usage of emerging technologies, project evaluation and funding issues. The existing structures, processes and regulations of the Indian system have a strong effect on a project’s success. A fundamental change to the model is difficult and unacceptable across the Indian bureaucracy. Also, the integration of new technologies with the “legacy” system is another important issue impacting the E-Governance success in India. Through this paper I am trying to identify the various obstacles to the success of these projects and what can be done to tackle these issues for the common good. Leadership failures across the diversified Indian geography and lack of co-ordination between the government machinery hold back the benefits of E-Governance projects. As per studies, only 15% of E-Governance projects implemented in developing countries are a success. In India, this percentage is further low. E-Bhoomi is an example of such project which had great prospects of building transparency and improving the lives of the people but faced initial complications because of several issues related to effective planning and implementation. The project was an attempt to computerize the Records of Rights Tenancy & Crops for the Indian farmers. The implementation however was affected due to two factors; firstly fraudulent land records went online and secondly the kiosks were located at places which implied additional costs in terms of time and money for the farmer. Thus, though a good initiative, it did not meet initial success because of negligence on the part of the authorities. There are several examples of successful E-Governance projects in India like Gyandoot, Lokmitra, MCA21, etc but each suffers the impact of corruption, neglect, illiteracy, infrastructure and inaccessibility amongst the various other factors which are inherent part of India. Through this paper I will try to unfold the various E-Governance projects in India which have not been able to meet their objectives, the issues and challenges faced by them in the various stages of the project and the action that can be taken to improve the success rate of these projects.

White Paper: Transactional Replication

I had written the below paper as a solution to a problem faced during SQL 2000 issue analysis at Microsoft. This white paper will help provide real time data availability to the users by skipping the large transaction which is blocking subsequent replication transactions and thus adding to the data latency. Below is a part of the paper, detailed solution is posted in the Microsoft internal website.

 

Introduction

Replication is a set of technologies for copying and distributing data and database objects from one database to another and then synchronizing between databases for consistency.

This white paper discusses about the Transactional Replication. Merge and Snapshot replication are not in scope of this white paper.

With transactional replication, an initial snapshot of data is applied at Subscribers, and then when data modifications are made at the Publisher, the individual transactions are captured and propagated to Subscribers. A minimum of three server roles are required for transactional replication:

• Publisher, hosting the publication database 
• Distributor, hosting the distribution database 
• Subscriber, hosting the subscription database 

For in depth details please refer URL:http://blogs.msdn.com/chrissk/archive/2009/05/25/transactional-replication-conversations.aspx

CRMPublish Case Study:

CRMPublish Overview
CRMPublish is a subscriber (replicated database) of the CRM Ecosystem and is a data source for ~120 downstream applications. There are almost 162 objects which are being replicated from the CRM Ecosystem into the CRMPublish DB.

Large Number of Commands in a Single Transaction
In a transactional replication, it is expected to have near real time data availability in the Subscriber database. If there is a delay in replicating the data on the subscriber, we call it as replication latency. There are multiple causes for latency and one of them is due to the large number of commands in a single transaction.

We experienced a similar issue in our application CRM Publish. Following were the observations during the incident:

• The replication slowed down on CRM Publish increasing the latency.
• A single transaction with 6.2 Million commands resulted in the issue.
• The transaction was introduced into the publisher through a bulk upload. 
• Adding to the above transaction, the replication from Distributor to Subscriber further slowed down due to the subsequent transactions flowing from the publisher and getting piled up on the distributor. 

During the event, the replication monitor showed as “Delivering Replicated Transactions”(see below). It continued to display this message until the commands within the transactions are delivered.

If the commands are more than a million and is followed by subsequent large number of commands pending to be replicated and is adding to huge latency, you may opt for the below to avoid latency.

One of the ways to surmount this problem is:
Skipping a LSN – which means skipping the transaction having large number of commands and later applying the skipped data contained in the LSN manually over the Subscriber. This is applicable to one way transactional replication


Skipping a LSN (XACT_SEQNO) or a Transaction in a replication environment

This section presents the steps and code required to skip a single transaction. STEP 1 is specific for the transaction with large number of commands but in all cases involving a transaction skip, first we need to identify the transaction which has to be skipped (STEP 1) and then check if the transaction is currently being replicated (STEP 2).

This paper talks about a single transaction having large number of commands. There could be multiple such transactions having large number of commands and it does not describe about this scenario.

STEP 1: Identify the LSN which has large number of commands

STEP 2: Check if the above noted LSN (XACT_SEQNO) is the same as being currently replicated in Subscriber

STEP 3: To find article(s) involved in the large single transaction under replication

STEP 4: To skip the transaction from replication
a) Skip the transaction
b) Skip a table from the transaction

STEP 5: Apply the Data on the Subscriber database

STEP 6: Restart the Distribution Agent job

STEP 7: To confirm if the transaction has been skipped


Conclusion
This whitepaper shows how a replication transaction with huge number of commands can be skipped from being replicated.

We may decide to skip the transaction because of the following reasons:

1. The transaction takes a long time to commit increasing the replication latency.
2. Other transactions are waiting in the queue for the completion of this batch of transaction. This increases the load on the server further slowing down the server performance.
3. If the transaction rolls back before committing the complete batch of commands, it will restart the process of replication. This will lead to phenomenal increase in the data latency.

GoGreenInTheCity

The day had come when the efforts of all 50 of us since the past 6 months would be realized. I had never thought that a simple thought can be built into a complete business solution for a world leader in active energy management solutions, Schneider Electric.

It started in January, 2011; we received a mail for GoGreenInTheCity by Schneider Electric, another case study competition though with a difference. This time we had to give our own idea of how to conserve or preserve energy in our city. Such competitions have usually excited us and the incentive was too much to be ignored (the winners get a world tour). I think many people thought on the same lines as the 2 of us because more than 500 teams participated in the competition globally.

It was the most difficult to clear the first round with the amount of competition and with the best brains in the world. We sent our submission and named it “Green Walk”. The idea clicked; we were amongst the top 100 from the world to be selected. The feeling changed from a shock to happiness to excitement to exhilaration. We had always worked hard for any competition we had put our hands on; it finally bore fruit.

The stakes were high in round 2 but we also had a better chance of getting to round 3 with 25 teams from 100 to be selected. Our team was assigned a mentor from Schneider Electric, France office who later commented, “I had always been excited to listen to what you would have done next. I always looked forward to our weekly meetings and you always did more than what I expected.” She was the best mentor we would have ever got and the prime reason for giving a structure to our thoughts. Our 2^nd round submission was a 800 word document on the idea we had submitted in the 1^st round. We prepared this in the form of a story and the title read “The GreenWalk Journey”.

Our simplicity and creativity (as commented by our mentor) clicked yet again and we cleared round 2. It was time to pack our bags for PARIS!!! It was the best that could have happened to us and our preparations for 3^rd round couldn’t be less. It was big and coming this far we had to crack it now! We now had 2 mentors, one from France and the other from China. With their help we further built our idea taking into account the drawbacks and the strengths of our product, the different stakeholders involved, product competition, its benefit to the society and amount of energy generation through the product. We submitted our 15 minute presentation incorporating the details.

We arrived in Paris and the show started. Our presentations were scheduled on 23^rd June, 2011. The judges were impressed and we were able to answer all their questions. They liked our presentation and the detailed work that we had done. The afternoon attraction was the t-shirts we had designed and worn for the GreenWalk launch. There were clapping in the room when we presented them our t-shirts. It was overall a satisfactory presentation and the rest of the day went in networking with the other 48 event finalists.

24^th June, 2011: the day when the winners had to be announced. It started with internship interviews followed by workshops while we became more and more excited for the evening results. They started with announcing the winners and the first name was “The GreenWalk Journey”; we were announced the competition runners up. It was the best moment ever, congratulations poured in from all sides followed by an interview and photoshoot. Visiting Paris was a memorable journey in itself and the runners up position was like an icing on the cake. I will never forget the 6 months that we were on this project and the unforgettable experience in Paris. The competitions are still on and hopefully the trend continues!