Business opportunity

Aflac Life Insurance Japan Ltd (Aflac) was for many decades alone in that country in offering supplemental health insurance to support cancer patients undergoing life-sustaining treatments.

In response to rapid demographic shifts in Japan, Aflac needed to add new life insurance services and transform their digital delivery to meet user expectations.
 

Technical challenge

To maintain business-as usual (BAU), Aflac’s IT operations team performed repetitive manual tasks across a complex mix of on-premises and cloud infrastructure. That essential maintenance introduced delays in delivering resources requested by development teams. As organized, Aflac IT could not efficiently deliver new products, and they also struggled to consistently focus on improving customer experiences.

Our solution

Together, Aflac and Kyndryl pursued three key initiatives to enhance agility. First, they transitioned to a squad-based teaming organized around business units, that aligns with “Tribe-Squad-Model” that is in line with Aflac’s company wide adoption. For this transformation Kyndryl adopted Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to improve operational efficiency.

Second, addressed IT process issues by automating data requests and retrieval tasks using Red Hat Ansible. Third, Aflac improved system observability by introducing Datadog, to monitor hybrid IT environment.

Automating operations is never simple. It requires a vision for what the future of operations should look like. Aflac and Kyndryl prioritized automation pain points and established Datadog as a shared monitoring tool between infrastructure and development teams. The team gave training sessions to the entire organization and it increased Datadog's active users by 40%.
 

"Through the visualization of daily operations via Kyndryl Bridge, Kyndryl’s integrated platform, we aim to standardize and automate routine tasks so that anyone can carry them out. The team will also gain insights through Kyndryl Bridge that enable Aflac to innovate their business."

Masaki Takeya
Kyndryl Site Reliability Engineer


 

What progress looks like

So far, by automating many routine tasks, Aflac squads now focus more on improving digital services based on data from user scenarios that indicate performance lags.