When you’re in an accident, that first call is to your family. For over eight million Australians and New Zealanders, that second call is to IAG. The largest general insurance company in Australia and New Zealand, IAG’s household brands include NRMA Insurance, CGU, NZI and State. IAG’s purpose is to ‘make your world a safer place’. The organisation gathers data, models risk, and puts that information into their customers’ hands to help them lead safer, healthier lives.

IAG has grown in expertise and organizational complexity, acquiring companies along the way. This has led to a sprawling IT ecosystem that includes both legacy technologies and new applications. To keep up with the evolving insurance industry and real-time needs of customers, IAG turned to GitHub to modernize and automate its development process. “GitHub helps IAG’s developers work faster than ever before,” said Kieran Clulow, director of data engineering and architecture.

Calculating risk and flagging fraud all require the right data at the right time. But the “right time” for data is changing. For years, gathering data overnight to review it the next morning was business as usual. Now, it’s increasingly important to process data as it arrives. “Moving to real-time streams of data required us to rethink the way we manage code,” explained Clulow. “Using GitHub allows us to support distributed development and an automated pipeline. This has accelerated the speed of development and allowed us to focus on the work that matters.”

Historically, developers at IAG used a variety of version control and code management tools, including Subversion and BitBucket. Some simply sent code back and forth in email attachments. But even without a top-down mandate, “our teams are moving to GitHub organically because they prefer the UI and features,” said platform engineering manager Burak Hoban. “The migration to GitHub has been a grassroots effort.” Today the entire data engineering team relies on GitHub for its development work. “Speaking for data, 100% of our code is in GitHub,” Clulow said.

Using GitHub allows us to support distributed development and an automated pipeline. This has accelerated the speed of development and allowed us to focus on the work that matters.

Clulow has been at IAG since 2017, “and something that really struck me before we used GitHub was the manual nature of getting code into the production environment,” he said. Though IAG’s teams are skilled, this method left room for error. “Inevitably there are slight deviations, which impacts reliability.” Now that the process is automated, bugs that are fixed once are fixed forever. “We’ve seen a significant improvement in the reliability of our deployments thanks to GitHub,” Clulow explained.

Where it was once tedious and cumbersome, IAG’s entire ecosystem of tools is now streamlined and efficient. “We’ve got every single CI/CD tool under the sun integrated with GitHub,” said Hoban. For some repositories, the mobile team has replaced its CI/CD tools entirely with GitHub Actions. “We leverage a combination of custom and community Actions such as those for Gradle,” he said. “Migrating to Actions means less time spent managing configuration for tooling such as Jenkins. With one less thing to worry about in an increasingly complex environment, teams can get on with their jobs.”

Cutting back on the number of tools at IAG means developers spend less time switching contexts and more time on quality code. “GitHub Codespaces reduces that cognitive load because developers don’t have to worry about changing tool sets when they change projects,” Clulow said. “They can refocus that effort onto the project at hand.”

IAG’s data engineering team already leverages GitHub for open source projects like Apache Kafka, and encourages developers to contribute bug fixes and improvements upstream. “We want to take advantage of open source technology, and offer our expertise back where we can,” said Clulow. The size of the community also helps IAG address any outlying issues and move on quickly. “We can take advantage of innovations from the open source community and make our customer’s world safer.” GitHub’s vulnerability scanning adds an additional layer of security.

Open source best practices translate to a culture of innersource at IAG. “Taking the spirit of open source and applying it to our internal workflows has broken down silos across the organization and made GitHub a powerful tool for collaboration,” said Clulow. Before, geographic and information silos could easily pose a problem. For example, an important customer might have properties with policies in both New Zealand and Australia, but those policies might be managed by separate departments. In order to get a full picture of a customer’s holdings, data needs to flow freely between teams and divisions. “GitHub gives us a common platform where everything lives,” Clulow said. “Using the same technology and the same environment facilitates collaboration much more effectively.”

Beyond just developers, teams around the company are also using GitHub to create internal Wikis, build websites with GitHub Pages, and manage mailing lists with pull requests. This was especially helpful when the pandemic hit: With GitHub firmly in place, IAG could easily pivot to work from home. “COVID-19 helped us to accelerate and find better, leaner, and simpler ways of collaborating in GitHub,” said Hoban. Across the company, teams were able to continue work without missing a beat.

Today’s insurance customers expect on-demand service, and IAG has leveraged GitHub to evolve and not only meet that expectation, but use data as a product to change work across the company. “Democratizing data with GitHub was really quite transformative for our organization,” said Clulow. “It’s a real demonstration of the power of that mindset shift.”