DARIUS KUMANA

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak within a CIO Leadership round table for the 5th Annual Insurance Technology Congress. This event aims to bring together insurance technology experts across the industry to help guide people through the inevitable change that is going on within the marketplace.

I was lucky enough to be invited to participate at Google's inaugural "Leaders @ Google" event in London. This event is designed to bring digital leaders across industry together to share insights and war-stories. I met a bunch of great folks - not only from Google, but from the likes of Amazon, Skype, Facebook etc.

In 2014, my team was a prizewinner at Spark the Change in recognition of the achievements we made in driving positive change and cultural transformation within the workplace. At their 2015 conference, I was pleased to be asked to do a follow up talk - sharing experiences from our ongoing digital transformation journey at Markel.

Digital leadership panel at EIF2015.  Great opportunity with more than 200 senior industry execs, and thought leaders from across the world taking a deep dive into the world of Fintech and the growing global challenges facing the re/insurance industry. 

My team and I from Markel Digital participated in a number of events for this years POST Insurance Digital Strategies conference. I spoke at the breakfast event on the Internet of Things and also closed the conference as part of a panel. It was great for me to see others from Markel International also providing thought-leadership throughout the day.

I was lucky enough to give the opening keynote for this years Insurance Technology conference. My talk is a call to arms for insurance leaders to challenge the statusquo and begin driving change from within. Insurance Technology 2014 is the premier gathering for senior technology strategists within the UK insurance sector. More about the keynote here:

Some would say that the only place you would find insurance and innovation close to each other was in the dictionary! My team at Markel International are starting to prove the neigh-sayers wrong by continuing to driveout digital vision within the insurance industry. It seems that our efforts are starting to bare fruit as we have been awarded 2nd place in the 2014 Spark the Change Awards!

I was privileged to deliver the opening keynote for UX Camp Vienna this year. This talk takes a moment to explore some of the challenges and opportunities facing user experience as a community of practice. I talk about problems in the way UX professionals have come to define what they do and who they are within the industry. 

Its the long-standing industries that tend to move slowly. They often have interesting challenges around scale, existing infrastructure (technical and organisational) as well as baked-in processes and legislation. These are the biggest transformational challenges. I love how simple concepts around disruptive innovation can really start to shake things up!

This was the event that kickstarted ThoughtWorks Experience Design in Hamburg! We hosted Hamburg's UX RoundTable at our new office in Germany. We met a whole host of interesting people and shared a bunch of concepts around agile experience design.

Nothing quite as satisfying as meeting old friends (armed with nerf-guns!). A quirky adaption of a workshop I first gave to the DMC design agency in Vienna. This was a chance to catch up with my long-standing friend and colleague Eewei Chen. Together, we ran a joint workshop at UX Bristol (an amazing event organised by another old-time XDer - my good friend Stuart Church).

I enjoyed chatting with Penny Pullman on "BAs working with User-Experience" as part of the BA Summit. I have always been a believer in the need for "poly-skilled" people and have always observed a natural overlap between the disciplines of user experience and that of business analysis.

I recently presented this talk at the ThoughtWorks European Awayday. Thoughtworkers are an informed, opinionated and passionate bunch (not to mention pretty sharp!) so this was another great test for these ideas. It seems that the concepts appeal to a varied audience (ranging from practitioner through to executive leadership).

Agile delivery typically focuses on the prioritisation and development of user stories. Often the focus is on developer throughput and misses the overall value proposition of the software from the perspective of the end-user. My talk introduces a user-goal based framework for setting up and managing agile projects for success.