The Solar Corona Insurance Company
Throughout the chapters in Part 2, we will be looking at the fictional breakthrough stories of several delivery and business leaders who knew very little about agile: we’ll combine them into one composite persona for this book, a leader we’ll call Linda.
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5 The Solar Corona Insurance Company Throughout the chapters in Part 2, we will be looking at the fictional breakthrough stories of several delivery and business leaders who knew very little about agile: we’ll combine them into one composite persona for this book, a leader we’ll call Linda. Linda is just like you and me—a conscientious and respected executive in her corporation (Solar Corona Insurance Company), trying to succeed with the new assignments given to her. As you will see as the story unfolds, she made strides to achieve business agility, but for every two steps forward, she took one step back. First, let’s set the stage by looking at Linda’s company, the Solar Corona Insurance Company. Next, we’ll get to know Linda herself. At the end, I’ll lead a review session as Linda’s agile consultant. Special thanks to Gene Mrozinski, Advisor, Transformation Consulting, at CA Technologies, for contributing to the development of this case study.
© CA 2019 J. Orvos, Achieving Business Agility, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3855-4_5
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Chapter 5 | The Solar Corona Insurance Company
Introducing the Solar Corona Insurance Company Solar Corona is a fictional company that represents a synthesis of various companies that CA Technologies has conducted business with, but the events described represent depictions of actual challenges faced by those companies and CA Technologies in assisting them.
Humble Beginnings Solar Corona began back in the early 1900s as Solar Corona Mutual, offering both livestock and crop insurance. The company was structured as a mutual in order to provide better benefits to its customers, in that any “profits” made by the mutual went directly back to the policyholders. Some of the driving forces behind the creation of Solar Corona Mutual were the problems that ranchers and farmers were having with animal illnesses, such as the extensive foot-and-mouth disease epidemics of 1924 and 1929, along with crop destruction through various blights and insect attacks, such as tomato blight and the July 1931 grasshopper swarm that destroyed millions of acres. Crops were also affected immensely by the dust storms of 1934. These conditions, in addition to the creation of the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation in 1938, generated significant demand for Solar Corona Mutual products. The Federal Crop Insurance Corporation was formed to act as an intermediary between farmers and insurance companies, creating specific contract terms that structured the policy to be fair. The policies required that the farmers insure all eligible acreage for a particular crop, thereby eliminating situations where the farmers—having more knowledge of the relative risks for different acreages—only insured the areas of highest risk. As the number of policies started to grow, Solar Corona Mutual began to use IBM tabulating equipment in the 1940s for billing and accounting. The IBM 80-column punch card, which had been introduced in 1928, became the record-keeping instrument of choice for the company. They also used the IBM Type 4
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