Original source: SiliconAngle interview with Mojgan Lefebvre, recorded at Cloud Foundry Summit, Santa Clara, California. Interview conducted by Stu Miniman and John Troyer of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio.
Insurance in the Digital Age: Why Software Eats Everything
Cloud computing, big data, advanced analytics, and the Internet of Things are not just trends — they are fundamentally restructuring how organizations deliver products and services. For the insurance industry, these forces are particularly disruptive, because they alter the very mechanisms used to assess risk, price policies, and interact with customers.
In this environment, insurers that once thought of themselves primarily as financial-risk businesses are being forced to think and operate like software companies. Liberty Mutual Insurance is one of the most prominent examples of this shift. Mojgan Lefebvre, then Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Global Specialty at Liberty Mutual, articulated the company’s position clearly:
“Our world is changing; technology’s driving a lot of that change. We know that we’ve got to be a big player in that area as well. We’ve got to become one of those software companies that can actually sell insurance, opposed to the other way around.”
— Mojgan Lefebvre, SVP and CIO of Global Specialty, Liberty Mutual Insurance
That framing — a software company that sells insurance — captures a philosophical realignment that has significant operational consequences for how Liberty Mutual staffs, organizes, and invests in its technology function.
The Legacy Problem: Why Greenfield Thinking Matters
Most large insurers carry a significant burden of legacy infrastructure — systems designed for batch processing, on-premises data centers, and siloed application architectures that predate modern APIs, microservices, and real-time customer interaction patterns. These systems cannot easily support the low-latency, always-available digital experiences that both customers and agents now expect as a baseline.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers report on top insurance industry issues (published around the time of this interview, 2017) identified cloud migration as a strategic imperative for insurers seeking to improve infrastructure agility, expand their technology ecosystems, accelerate product development, and address ongoing talent shortages.
Many organizations have responded by pursuing a greenfield approach: rather than attempting complex, high-risk migrations of existing systems, they build new capabilities entirely in cloud environments and allow legacy systems to be retired over time. Lefebvre described navigating this decision at Liberty Mutual:
“The global applications always make it much more difficult as you think, ‘How do you replicate among different clouds in different geographies?’ Those are some of the blockers that we’ve got to tackle and make sure that we get around.”
— Mojgan Lefebvre
The practical challenge is sequencing: deciding which workloads move to the cloud first, how development environments interact with production environments during transition, and how to maintain coherent operations across multiple cloud providers and geographic regions. There is no universal playbook — Lefebvre acknowledged that a significant amount of learning happens in real time as organizations work through these decisions.
The Experience Gap: Competing for Talent and Mindshare
One of the more underappreciated drivers of internal change at organizations like Liberty Mutual is the experience gap — the contrast between the consumer software tools employees use at home and the enterprise systems they encounter at work. Lefebvre named this directly:
“Our employees, our consumers now have all these other software companies that they have experience with, and so their expectations are very different. They’ve got one experience when they’re at home and then they come into the workplace and it looks like they’ve gone back 100 years. So that paradigm needs to change.”
— Mojgan Lefebvre
This dynamic creates two simultaneous pressures. First, employees — particularly developers — are less willing to tolerate outdated tooling and slow delivery processes when they know better alternatives exist. Second, customers increasingly compare their insurer’s digital experience to that of tech-native companies, and find traditional insurance interfaces wanting.
Both pressures point toward the same internal response: modernize the development platform, adopt DevOps practices, and enable faster, more iterative software delivery.
Choosing a Platform: Cloud Foundry and Pivotal
Liberty Mutual’s path to its development platform was driven organically from within the engineering organization. Developers within the company were early advocates for Pivotal Software and Cloud Foundry — an open-source, multi-cloud application platform designed to abstract infrastructure complexity away from development teams and enable rapid, repeatable deployments.
The internal champion effect made adoption easier. When developers already trusted the platform, it reduced the persuasion burden on leadership and accelerated organizational buy-in. Lefebvre noted that Pivotal also helped shift the business leadership’s mental model away from trying to execute transformation all at once, toward an iterative delivery approach — a core principle of both Agile and DevOps methodologies.
Cloud Foundry’s ability to run across multiple cloud providers — including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure — was particularly relevant to Liberty Mutual’s goal of maintaining cloud independence. Lefebvre was explicit about this strategic objective:
“We truly mean it when we say we want 75 percent of the [IT staff] writing code, and we don’t want them to have to worry about the infrastructure. We definitely want to be independent of [AWS or Microsoft’s cloud], and I would say something like Cloud Foundry definitely allows you to do that.”
— Mojgan Lefebvre
The rationale for cloud-provider independence is straightforward from an enterprise risk management perspective: avoiding lock-in to a single hyperscaler preserves negotiating leverage, reduces vendor concentration risk, and allows the company to adopt best-of-breed services across providers without being constrained by a single ecosystem.
Building a Developer Culture: The 75 Percent Goal
Perhaps the most concrete and ambitious target Lefebvre set was that 75 percent of Liberty Mutual’s IT staff should be writing code. This is a significant statement for a large, traditional financial-services company whose IT function has historically included large proportions of infrastructure operations, project management, vendor management, and support roles.
Reaching that ratio requires more than hiring. It demands upskilling existing employees — many of whom joined the organization in non-coding roles — and providing them with the tools, education, and time to develop software skills. Lefebvre described the strategy as investing in the people already inside the organization:
“Our goal is to get anyone on our staff who really wants to get there and is willing to put the sweat in, to be able to do it. Getting our own employees that we value greatly to be able to do that transformation is critical for us.”
— Mojgan Lefebvre
This approach has practical advantages beyond cost. Existing employees already understand the business domain — the insurance products, regulatory environment, and customer workflows — that external hires would need months to learn. Converting a claims analyst or an infrastructure engineer into a developer who understands the business context can produce more effective software than hiring a capable developer with no insurance knowledge.
Participation in community events such as the Cloud Foundry Summit was part of this cultural investment — exposing internal teams to the broader developer ecosystem, current tooling trends, and the professional identity of modern software engineering.
DevOps as a Strategic Framework, Not Just a Tool Set
Lefebvre’s comments align closely with findings from Puppet’s State of DevOps research (the 2017 edition was available around the time of this interview), which consistently showed that the ability to deliver software efficiently and reliably is a key competitive differentiator across all industries — not just technology companies.
In response, Liberty Mutual’s IT leadership developed an internal IT manifesto — a statement of principles and priorities designed to align the technology organization around bold, explicit goals. DevOps practices and culture became central to this manifesto, shaping hiring, tooling decisions, team structures, and executive priorities.
The strategic logic is consistent with how high-performing DevOps organizations operate: by reducing the friction between development and operations, shortening feedback loops, automating testing and deployment, and enabling teams to ship working software more frequently with less risk.
The Evolving Role of the CIO
The transformation underway at Liberty Mutual also reflects a broader shift in what effective technology leadership looks like. Analyst firm Gartner (around this time period) warned that CIOs who failed to develop their teams’ capabilities to meet digital demands risked losing their positions as organizations restructured for the digital era.
Lefebvre offered a more optimistic view of the CIO’s trajectory — one of enhancement rather than obsolescence:
“I’d say there’s probably more and more need for very business-oriented, strategic CIOs. They’re the epitome of someone who understands technology and is the head of engineering, but also making sure that they can work very well with the business and understands the impact of technology on the business.”
— Mojgan Lefebvre
This framing positions the modern CIO less as a technology custodian and more as a business strategist who happens to lead engineering. The ability to translate technical capability into business outcomes — and to do so iteratively, transparently, and at pace — is the defining competency of effective technology leadership in a DevOps-driven organization.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners and Engineering Leaders
- Platform independence matters at scale. Liberty Mutual’s use of Cloud Foundry to avoid hyperscaler lock-in is a deliberate enterprise architecture decision, not an afterthought. Organizations with global footprints should evaluate how their platform choices affect multi-cloud and multi-region flexibility.
- Internal champions accelerate adoption. Developer-led platform selection — where engineers advocate for tools they have already validated — reduces top-down resistance and speeds organizational adoption of new development practices.
- Upskilling existing staff is a competitive advantage. Domain knowledge embedded in existing employees has real value. Investing in coding education for non-developer staff can produce engineers who understand the business context that external hires lack.
- Iterative transformation beats big-bang projects. Moving from waterfall-style transformation programs to iterative delivery reduces risk and enables faster learning — a shift that often requires as much cultural work as technical work.
- The CIO role is becoming an engineering leadership role. Technology executives who cannot credibly lead software engineering organizations — not just manage technology budgets — will find their relevance diminishing as software moves to the center of every business.