Chicago has 15,000 restaurants and 42 health inspectors. If that sounds like cause for concern, the city’s health department agrees. That’s why, in 2013, they asked Allstate’s data and analytics team to help them make the most efficient use of those limited inspectors.
Allstate wanted to help. So they shared their team with the city.
Allstate’s Data, Discovery, and Decision Science team (D3), which counts analyzing insurance trends among its many areas of expertise, jumped at the chance to help through the Project Lightbulb initiative. Project Lightbulb gives each D3 employee four hours per week to pursue any work-related interests outside their daily responsibilities.
Using 600 publicly available datasets that reflected a multitude of factors, such as weather patterns, burglaries, and liquor licenses, the team wrote a program in two months that picked the restaurants most likely to be in violation of health codes. As a result, inspectors could zero in on potential problems, preventing sanitation-related illnesses. The partnership expanded into new areas, like elevator inspections, in subsequent years.
Project Lightbulb is just one way Allstate is harnessing diverse skills and experiences to innovate in a surprisingly dynamic industry: insurance. As self-driving cars shuttle passengers through smart cities soon to be populated by delivery drones and a trillion connected devices, Allstate’s data scientists are working now to identify risks and invent ways to protect consumers, using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and image-recognition software. What’s fueling this innovation is a company culture that prizes employees’ independence and creativity.
“We are given the freedom to explore novel solutions,” says Jean Utke, a data scientist and technical director in D3. “There is a willingness to embrace new ideas, and that trickles down from the top leadership.”
Jean Utke
Data Scientist and Technical Director at Allstate
Designing Technology for Tomorrow
That commitment to exploration and challenging conventions has been part of the company’s operating model from its earliest days. In 1931, General Robert E. Wood created Allstate after recognizing that the industry’s future lay in mail-order auto insurance. Eighty-six years later, in 2017, Mia Boom-Ibes, Allstate’s vice president of security innovation, strategy, and analytics, says the company saw a similar opportunity in its website.
The challenge was that Allstate’s core digital ecosystems needed updating to meet the future needs of its millions of customers. Piece by piece, software engineers took apart the digital platforms—everything from the customer-facing websites to the data networks that underpin them—and put them together again in a way that created better-integrated systems and networks. The result is a powerful and seamless user interface for customers.
“We started breaking everything into microservices,” says Boom-Ibes, a 20-year veteran of the tech industry who oversaw the update of the website and app. Of Allstate’s roughly 45,000 employees, about 9 percent work in software and software development. Boom-Ibes put her employees into teams and assigned them different pieces of the digital overhaul. Soon it became clear that to make each piece work independently—and as part of the whole—she needed her employees to experiment. They had to be empowered to act on their intuition. “We had to have decision clarity so that people had the right authority at the right levels to do their work,” she says. “It couldn’t have a hierarchical component.”
The project left Boom-Ibes and her team feeling more invested in their work. By letting employees run with good ideas, the company could overhaul its customer website and app. Allstate’s customers can now get homeowners protection in minutes, plus microinsurance policies for smartphone batteries, identity protection, and car insurance that allows them to pay rates based on miles driven.
“We were able to do this,” says Boom-Ibes, “because we have leaders within Allstate who capitalize on opportunities in an industry that’s changing rapidly.”
Dr. Sudesh Kannan
Allstate's Cyber and App Security Training Lead
Building Technology—and Community
Sudesh Kannan, Allstate’s cyber and app security training lead, attributes the company's success to its diverse workforce. Originally a metallurgist who became an adjunct professor of cybersecurity at the University of Maryland, Kannan joined Allstate and realized that the company employed some of the smartest people in technology. But they weren’t your classic tech people. The digital security team included an art and philosophy major, a former banker, and a data scientist who was responsible for making Allstate’s digital environment more secure by training employees on safer social behaviors.
“The diversity you get at Allstate just blows your mind,” Kannan says. “Our creativity stems from our diversity.”
One of Allstate’s strategies for enhancing innovation is giving employees reasons to love working there. Last year, for example, Kannan took more than 200 hours of training sessions as part of his job, which benefited the company but also equipped Kannan with knowledge and skills he could use if he ever left Allstate. He was also encouraged to volunteer in the community on company time. As a longtime adult leader of a Boy Scout troop, Kannan recognized the need to teach kids good cybersecurity habits, so he developed a course for them. After a few years working with kids on the program, he and the Allstate Cybersecurity Communication team developed a similar course for older adults. “For me, this job is so much more than a paycheck,” Kannan says. “It’s about helping our community.”
Allstate is supporting community enrichment across the company. One team developed a system that decreased incidence of texting and driving, which causes 1.6 million crashes per year in the U.S. Another created a program that scans data repositories across the internet and dark web for sensitive personal information like Social Security numbers and health history.
For Boom-Ibes, the company’s future lies in building a team that’s empowered to use technology to think creatively about challenges both known and unknown. But it’s also about reinforcing the belief that employees’ work truly does make the world a better place. “For us, ‘You’re in good hands with Allstate’ isn’t a platitude,” she says. “It’s our ethos.”
Want to join Allstate in building the future of protection? See all of their opportunities here.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Allstate.
