Good .Net devs are at a premium, so one CIO took the lo-code route

One day, Winn Group CIO Clint Milnes took a sales call that proved to be the answer to his staffing problems

Fifteen years ago, the career of solicitor Clint Milnes' took a diversion.

"There was no-one to develop the case management system. There was this lacuna in the middle where the solicitor would say 'I want you to code a Part 36 offer' and the developer would go 'what the hell's a Part 36 offer?'"

So Milnes taught himself to code, and before too long he was writing modules himself, drawing on his legal knowledge.

At the time, the northeastern legal company he was working for primarily dealt with large mining claims which had a finite life: once completed, the company shrank. Having been promoted to head of practice, Milnes outsourced a lot of the tech to an MSP to make it more flexible. "So, I had to learn about servers and networks, because I needed to know if they were doing their job."

Now CIO at Winn Group - and still a practicing solicitor - Milnes says he's pleased to be able to sit in a meeting between the business and IT and grasp the detail on both sides. He can support developers when things aren't going to plan ("there are just so many things that can happen") while also understanding why the business managers are insisting that this or that project must be prioritised.

The culture gap

His rather unusual path to IT leadership has also left Milnes convinced that to be effective, IT staff need to have some knowledge of the domain, particularly when it comes to the arcane world of legal firms and brokerages.

Headquartered in Newcastle, Winn Group is a rapidly expanding provider of accident management, legal, health care and medico-legal services across the UK, mainly working through brokers. Primarily a firm of solicitors, the company also operates the On Medical, On Hire and On Insurance brands, offering an end-to-end accident management and rehabilitation service.

Thanks to a four-fold increase in the numbers of cases it handles, the company has grown by 150 employees in a year, and is still adding roughly 20 people per month to its current headcount of 500 employees.

Developers should ask 'why am I doing this' not just 'can I do it'

Despite the company's success, finding developers to drive the transformation and automation is hard, says Milnes. Technical skills are not enough; they must also be a good fit, which means having a feel for the intricacies and culture of the business and its location. Outsourced developers generally don't match this requirement, and this has been exacerbated during the pandemic, Milnes says.

"I'm not adverse to homeworking. However, if you've got someone working outside the northeast, I feel it's more difficult for them to understand the business and the needs of the business, which I think are very important in development."

Developers, he insists, "should ask 'why am I doing this', not just 'can I do it'?"

To cope with the upsurge in cases, Winn has been updating and digitising its vehicle hire service. With a thousand new cases each month, all parties - brokers, care hire agencies and repair shops - need to be invoiced separately, and with each invoice taking 25 minutes to process clearly this represented a huge drain on resources. It was decided to streamline the invoicing process by building a new API to connect the various parties, remove friction and reduce the number of manual touchpoints.

The company uses the Proclaim case management system, which is based on .Net, but unfortunately lacked internal .Net developers it could draw upon - and hiring good ones was proving difficult, Milnes explains.

"I was looking at third-party consultants to build the middleware and APIs to sit between our case management system and a third-party broker but I was paying a significant daily rate and having to wait two or three months. And there was no understanding of our system"

A lucky call

Sales calls are not always welcome, and many IT leaders employ gatekeepers to keep them out. But by a stroke of good fortune, while he was pondering his developer dilemma Milnes picked up the phone to Toca, a Reading-based provider of a lo-code platform and automation services, and in a flash realised that this could be a way forward.

"I don't usually take those calls, but it totally piqued my interest," he says. " At the time I was looking at the internal staffing route, getting our own developers to build this thing, but I hadn't thought about this way."

Training internal developers in .Net and C# would have taken a long time, but having plumped for Toca's platform Winn Group is now proceeding to develop new applications with no retraining required.

Already this has borne fruit, with the new fully automated invoicing system up and running, drastically reducing processing time and increasing accuracy.

The solution is at heart an extensible API that can integrate with partners' existing systems, as well as being able to accommodate new providers, including "one-man-band repair shops" that have no tech expertise of their own.

"It would have been impossible for us to provide APIs for all those small providers and also integrate with the ones the large providers use, whereas with Toca we've built a one-stop platform where they can link in to various degrees, depending on their technical ability," Milnes explains.

An automated "mini case management system" for hire providers has been completed, a stepping stone to automating the entire motor claims process.

A platform for opportunity

Currently, Milnes' team is working on a front end for the system, after which the plan is to replicate it to other parts of the operation, including recovery and storage and medical reports, and finally the core legal business itself.

They are also eyeing opportunities in other legal sectors, such as wills and probate, which Milnes says is still very traditional and paper-based.

"We think that we can disrupt that marketplace and make it more digitised and our new platform has a massive place in that."