Technology & AI · Digital Business

Value from Tech — Shannon Mutual's Last Transformation

A four-round, advanced digital-transformation simulation set inside Shannon Mutual, a mid-sized Irish life-and-pensions insurer (€18bn assets, 640,000 policyholders, 1,200 staff) running on a 34-year-old mainframe that 70% of operations still depend on.

4 rounds Executive English, Español

Preview

About this simulation

A four-round, advanced digital-transformation simulation set inside Shannon Mutual, a mid-sized Irish life-and-pensions insurer (€18bn assets, 640,000 policyholders, 1,200 staff) running on a 34-year-old mainframe that 70% of operations still depend on.

After three failed transformation programmes in eight years — the last over-ran €9M with no measurable benefit, and only 22% of what it delivered is actually used — a botched online-renewals release corrupts 14,000 policyholder records, froze renewals for four days, cost ~€2.1M, and triggers a Central Bank of Ireland letter demanding a 90-day remediation plan.

A digital-native competitor serves at €25 per policy against Shannon Mutual's €42 and is taking ~3% of younger customers a year. As the newly appointed transformation leader (Chief Digital Officer) you have a €30M two-year budget — the last the board will fund unproven — and a board that will outsource the entire IT function if a fourth programme fails.

Grounded in Joe Peppard's thesis that realising value from technology is a leadership and organisational challenge, not a technical one, you (1) diagnose why three programmes delivered technology but not value, separating delivery from realisation and naming the organisational root causes; (2) prioritise and sequence a fixed-budget initiative portfolio, balancing a visible Year-1 win against foundational capability and respecting dependencies (no mobile self-service on a frozen mainframe); (3) redesign the IT operating model and split the €30M across paying down technical debt, building new capability, and funding change/adoption; and (4) commit the plan to the board chair and the Central Bank reviewer with named business owners for benefit realisation and a credible 90-day remediation.

The math rewards genuine value realisation — business ownership, adoption, a balanced debt-vs-capability split, dependency-aware sequencing, and resilience woven into the regulator response — and punishes the five classic errors: technology equals value, capability on sand, all-debt-no-value, an unchanged project-shop IT function, and treating compliance as an afterthought.

Final KPIs track Value Realized, Adoption, Technical-Debt Health, and the €30M committed against the cap.

Who it is for

An advanced simulation for participants used to working with the main frameworks and trade-offs of the subject, designed for executive education and experienced professionals.

How a session runs

  1. The instructor creates a session from the Eureka dashboard and invites the participants.
  2. Participants play 4 rounds. In each one they submit their decisions and the simulation calculates the results.
  3. The simulation can be run in English, Español.
  4. The instructor follows each participant's progress and results from the dashboard, and uses the class results for the debrief.

Decisions participants make

The decisions participants make during the simulation:

  • Why did three well-funded programmes deliver technology but not value?
  • How do you define "value" for Shannon Mutual in measurable terms?
  • How candidly does your team name this as an organizational, not a technical, problem? (%)
  • Which foundation do you build FIRST, before customer-facing initiatives?
  • What is your visible Year-1 win to keep the board funding the programme?
  • How rigorously do you respect dependencies when sequencing the roadmap? (%)
  • How do you redesign the IT operating model and locate accountability for value?
  • Split the €30M across the three levers (must total €30.0M)
  • Build, buy or partner for the 34-year-old core platform?
  • How will value actually be realized — what the last three programmes lacked?

What participants track

What participants follow on screen as the rounds go by:

  • Value, Adoption & Platform-Health Trajectory

Subjects covered

Designed for courses in Digital Business.

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