Work

125 years of essential data, replatformed for future needs

The Opportunity

When someone is injured at work, what follows is complex for everyone – the employee dealing with recovery, the employer managing liability and the insurer balancing speed, accuracy and compliance. When that complexity leads to delays, the impact on an injured claimant can be significant, arriving at a time when they are already under strain.
In 1969 the Employment Liability Act made it mandatory for all employers to be covered by liability insurance. Over the following years, as more and more people developed symptoms caused by exposure to asbestos in the workplace, it became apparent that there was a need for a repository of data, to allow claimants to find the employment liability policies that applied to the work they had been doing years, and sometimes decades, ago.
The Employers’ Liability Tracing Office (ELTO) was formed in 2011 to give claimants easy access to their employers’ liability insurance data. This database now holds more than 40 million individual policies dating back over 125 years and has helped nearly 2000 people living with asbestos-related mesothelioma successfully find the policy that gives them a chance of securing compensation for this terrible condition. 
 
Fifteen years later, with demand for digital services driving the transformation of the insurance sector, ELTO approached Softwire to advise on, redesign and upgrade the Employers Liability Database platform. They wanted to deliver a faster, more reliable and more intuitive service while streamlining policy uploads, enhancing validation processes and improving reporting. At the same time, we were tasked with planning the migration of a century of complex data to the new platform while ensuring that those seeking information could access they data they needed without interruption.

Our Approach

Delivering this project demanded more than strong technical execution. Faced with a complex build and a legacy landscape carrying significant delivery risk, softwire supported ELTO in finding the right balance to delivery stability and platform migrations for its members. That meant advocating for a batch data sync approach over a big bang migration to protect delivery stability, putting together a proposal for insurer on-boarding that balanced end-user benefit, adoption timelines and build effort, and purposely sequencing scoping activities to support value-driven delivery. Our measure of success is ensuring that what we deliver is an intuitive, accessible digital platform that meaningfully improves search accuracy and usability for the needs of ELTO's members and users and reduce the operational burden on ELTO.
From our early conversations and review of the existing landscape, two areas stood out as carrying the greatest delivery risk: the migration of data from the legacy system, and the architectural and front-end approach for the new platform. Rather than treating discovery as a single linear phase, we tailored our approach to the specific shape of these risks and structured the consultancy around two parallel workstreams, each resourced with the right specialists and given the depth of focus the problem demanded. The first workstream focused on the data migration challenge. We need to understand, in concrete terms, how data could be moved securely and seamlessly from the legacy system within the required timelines – surfacing the technical realities, dependencies and edge cases clearly enough to influence delivery rather than disrupt it. The second workstream focused on architecture and front-end delivery. Here, the critical risk was less technical than organisations: securing early alignment with the stakeholders whose approval would ultimately gate the build. We engaged their technical approvers from day one, working through proposed technical design decisions, validating the direction before any significant build commitments were made. Running these workstreams in parallel – rather than sequentially – was a deliberate choice; it ensured neither area was deprioritised in favour of the other, which gave each the room to develop the depth and breadth of knowledge the risk warranted, and allowed us to enter delivery with a strong foundation.
At discovery inception, we facilitated structured ways of working sessions with ELTO to map the current state, understand existing user journeys, and build the shared context the team needed to move quickly and with confidence. We took a deliberate prioritisation approach — mapping the full journey landscape first and identifying which flows would deliver the most value from user research and de-risk the most risk for the build phase, rather than spreading effort thinly across lower-priority areas.
Running alongside the technical and research workstreams was a strict delivery plan, managed carefully to ensure sufficient time was built in ahead of each stage gate review — covering technical design authority sign-off, commercial review, and stakeholder approvals — so that nothing was being presented in an unfinished state. This rigour paid off: we secured TDA sign-off on the first submission, reflecting the depth of consideration that had gone into the architectural proposals and the team's ability to anticipate and address lines of challenge before they were raised.
By the close of discovery, the programme had a fully approved technical architecture, a validated design approach, a prioritised set of user research findings, a clear data and migration strategy, and a credible build estimate. This was all delivered within +1 week of the original timeline, helping ELTO accelerate delivery and get value into the hands of their customers more quickly.

The Impact

A fast-paced discovery phase delivered 12 full delivery and tech focused specifications and artifacts in just seven weeks to help set the foundations of a successful build phase. We are now working with their in-house tech team to build the platform that will support the public’s right to access employer liability insurance policies. Once data has been migrated to the new platform, users will experience a clean and efficient portal where provision has been put in place to fast-track claims related to mesothelioma, supporting those who have long suffered through the effects of workplace exposure to asbestos.

Our Work

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