How 6 Leading Chinese Insurers Accelerated Digital Transformation with DevOps Maturity Assessments

Amid widespread digital transformation, enterprises are adopting DevOps to boost IT efficiency. The "R&D‑Operations Integrated (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), provides strong guidance, and leading insurers have used it to assess and enhance their IT capabilities, integrate resources, and better support business systems.

Insurance Industry DevOps Standard Assessment Overview

Six insurance companies—Pacific Insurance, People's Insurance, China Life Property, Taikang Insurance, China Life (Overseas), and Postal Savings Bank—participated in a total of nine DevOps capability maturity model projects, with data collected up to December 15, 2023.

China Pacific Insurance: Four Projects Passed the Standard

China Pacific Insurance places great emphasis on technology empowerment for high‑quality development. Guided by a “assessment‑driven improvement” strategy, the group coordinated planning across subsidiaries and selected four projects (e‑commerce platform, unified life‑insurance underwriting platform, health‑insurance online system, and a pension fund document sorting project) that all successfully passed the CAICT DevOps Continuous Delivery Level‑3 assessment, demonstrating comprehensive breakthroughs in process organization, team collaboration, tool integration, development metrics, and demand delivery.

China Life (Overseas): OnePartner Project

The OnePartner platform is a self‑developed, multi‑channel insurance marketing service system integrating open‑source technologies for agents, banks, and intermediaries. Since its 2019 launch, it has achieved full‑process channel management, automated commission assessment, and online insurance issuance, greatly improving customer experience and operational efficiency. After applying DevOps standards and process improvements, the project’s development efficiency increased significantly.

People's Insurance: Distributed Core System Project

The project adopts a three‑tier architecture (front‑, middle‑, and back‑end) to build service centers, micro‑services, and meta‑services, enabling modular system construction and rapid adaptation to business model changes. It leverages a proprietary distributed micro‑service framework (PDF‑C) and container‑based private cloud to achieve high concurrency, elastic scaling, multi‑active data centers, and 2000‑km cross‑region intelligent traffic diversion, ensuring business continuity.

Taikang Insurance: Taikang Pension Internet Business Platform

This platform evolved from a legacy system, undergoing extensive technical and process refactoring to meet rapid business growth. The team employed a phased migration strategy, replacing old code incrementally while maintaining compatibility, ultimately delivering a scalable, maintainable, and stable solution after more than two years of effort.

China Life Property: Agricultural Insurance Claims System

The system supports the full claims lifecycle for four agricultural insurance types, offering rich functionality, advanced technology, and user‑friendly interfaces. After passing the Level‑3 Continuous Delivery assessment, the project achieved 100% unit‑test pass rate, 100% API test coverage, a five‑day average demand delivery cycle, and build times under 15 minutes, markedly improving delivery quality and efficiency.

About the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The "R&D‑Operations Integrated (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, BATJ, and major financial, telecom, and internet enterprises, is the most complete and authoritative DevOps standard in China. It has been published by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many leading firms. In July 2020, the model was officially concluded by the ITU‑T, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard. The framework covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security, system tools, business value management, collaborative development, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and reliability engineering.