APC Forum: Agility Transformation at Verisk Analytics

1 When Perry Rotella joined Verisk Analytics in 2009 as CIO, he wanted to increase the pace of delivering IT projects, which are critical to Verisk’s success as a data and analytics provider to such industries as insurance, healthcare, financial services, and supply chain. Rotella quickly realized that he had to find a solution that would substantially reduce the time it took to deliver to customers. The solution Rotella chose was transforming the system development process from the traditional waterfall method (where all requirements are detailed before the system is designed, coded, tested, and finally implemented) to agile development. When using agile development processes, projects are divided into “sprints” in which clients’ stories (key aspects of business functionality) are detailed, designed, coded, tested, integrated with previously developed code, and implemented as a fully functional system. Two-week sprints deliver new