How The Hartford uses GitHub

Through collaboration and innersourcing, The Hartford uses GitHub to evolve into a customer-centric insurance company.

Company Overview

The Hartford is a Fortune 500 property and casualty insurance company with over 200 years of experience. With 19,000 employees, $19 billion in annual revenue, and a ranking of 152 in the Fortune 500, The Hartford serves almost 40 million individuals and one million small businesses. The company has embraced technological innovations including Artificial Intelligence, Drones, and IoT as integral parts of their business model.

The Challenge and Solution

Prior to 2016, The Hartford used a functional source control system but required a more evolved process for developing and delivering code—one that focused on speed and quality. With a DevOps program in place and by partnering with GitHub, the company created more opportunities and capabilities beyond serving as a code repository. By switching to GitHub Enterprise, The Hartford set up an end-to-end DevOps ecosystem that gave their developers more access to repositories along with established integrated tools.

"GitHub helped drive our Cultural change, making collaboration natural and easy," said Jo Ann Tan, Vice President and Head of Infrastructure at The Hartford. "It created opportunities to develop effective and beneficial cross-team relationships, it provided a natural path to connect and develop our talent."

GitHub as Core Infrastructure

GitHub evolved beyond a code repository to become an integral part of The Hartford's development tool chain. The company supports automated infrastructure code and a custom gating process that loops back with their IT infrastructure to ensure code security. The Hartford created an extensive network of tools that work with GitHub to manage development at every step, from integration and virtualization to vulnerability assessment.

GitHub is core to The Hartford's annual Code-a-Thon, which challenged more than 200 developers on 45 teams to showcase and expand their skills.

"GitHub is really the start of everything," said Rich Tehan, Director of IT Automation Engineering. "When we talk about activating our entire CI/CD process, this is where the developers spend their time. We have all of these different capabilities built into the pipeline including SonaType for managing and securing binaries, SonarQube for quality scanning, and Checkmarx for vulnerability scanning. Developers set it up once, and then they're living in GitHub who ensures that every step in the process is being automated correctly."

Open Source and Innersourcing

Integrating GitHub with SonaType has been particularly key for facilitating The Hartford's open source projects, especially to ensure they're using the most updated libraries for their code. The company plans to expand their innersource projects for applications and infrastructure, which would give every developer the freedom to share their work with the world and support each other.

Expanding innersource projects is a natural bridge to bringing open source processes back to the team. Implementing more open source practices and making code more usable helps developers take their mature innersource program and scale it across the company. The Hartford hopes that by opening up more code repositories, they can begin to measure how many people are making pull requests and contributing to different repositories.

"Our development teams have benefited from the collaborative features of GitHub. It allows them to take co-development to a whole new level by working as a community and maturing our innersourcing practices," said Tan. "The GitHub platform has enabled us to exponentially raise the productivity of our developers and position us to meaningfully contribute back to the open community."

Cross-Functional Collaboration

GitHub has been key to The Hartford's enablement of collaboration between developers and other cross-functional teams, as well as facilitating more tracking across the organization. This allows managers to move away from hands-on project management and focus on keeping a general eye on work at each stage.

"When we look at the overall progress of a project, it's great, but we also have different roles and functions that can all collaborate on one repository. I can see who's involved in a project from a high level and make sure that our issues are getting resolved," Tehan added. "It's definitely been beneficial for us."

Measurable Results

Developers at The Hartford have already measured significant successes, including cutting down deployment time on some projects from six months or a year to two weeks, while maintaining a small team and low overhead. GitHub has also helped The Hartford attract new developers by making it clear that their team uses current tools and offers flexibility to developers, while still keeping the environment under steady control. Developers new to GitHub can take classes from beginner to expert-level on how to work within the platform.

Looking Forward

The Hartford plans to continue their digital transformation by pushing for more of an open community in their development culture that includes relying heavily on their partnership with GitHub.

"We've invested in GitHub—but GitHub has also invested in us," Tehan said. "We're working together to ensure that both companies make the most out of the platform by helping it effectively gain traction while making the larger community aware of what we've learned."