Global Transformation & Legacy Modernization (Cognizant)
Large business and IT transformation across the UK, Denmark, Hong Kong, Dubai, and Riyadh: IT strategy, business reengineering, cost optimization, and core modernization across personal, commercial, and specialty lines — plus leadership of the Policy Administration and Distribution Centers of Excellence.
- UK · Europe · ASEAN · Middle East · ANZ · US · India
- Markets
- 20 consultants
- CoE team led
Business context
Global insurers spent the 2010s confronting decades of legacy accumulation — mainframe policy systems, siloed distribution, and cost bases their markets would no longer carry.
The challenge
Deliver transformation consulting that survived contact with legacy reality across very different markets — from London specialty lines to Middle East greenfield operations.
Constraints
- Legacy estates with decades of undocumented business rules
- Regulatory and market structures that differ per country
- Transformation fatigue in organizations mid-way through prior failed programs
The solution
IT strategy, business reengineering, and core transformation engagements across personal, commercial, and specialty lines, backed by Centers of Excellence for Policy Administration and Distribution that turned engagement lessons into reusable method — leading consulting teams of up to 20.
Architecture
- Legacy core assessment and modernization roadmaps
- Policy administration and distribution reference architectures
Architecture diagram coming soon.
Product decisions I owned
- Codify delivery lessons into CoE assets so each engagement started from method, not memory.
- Sequence modernization by business value per release rather than system-by-system replacement.
Lessons learned
- The constraint is never the technology — it's the undocumented business rules and the people who hold them.
- Cost-optimization programs that don't fund the modernization that follows just defer the same crisis.
- Centers of Excellence are how consulting compounds; without them every engagement re-learns the last one.
If I rebuilt this with AI today
LLMs would do in weeks what discovery teams did in quarters — mining legacy code and documents for the business rules that decide whether a modernization is safe. The consulting value shifts from discovery to judgment.