Practicality vs Serendipity

on Sep 10 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: Analytics
Comments: No Comments »

Is your insurance company more concerned with being practical? Having the right tools, systems and capabilities available to run the business as effectively and efficiently as possible? Only replacing the business systems that can make the business run even smoother? Having an approach to decision-making and analytics that is entirely practical? That means running the same reports again and again although against new data (one dares to hope it is this at a minimum)? Using the same hypotheses to generate analytic reports and presentations?

Or … and here we take  as an adventurous journey as the one Alice did down that rabbit-hole (or through the looking glass, if you prefer), does your insurance company value serendipity? Accidently coming across new questions, new hypotheses and of course, new ways to report and present the results of analytical queries? Does your insurance company understand the competitive imperatives behind those moments of aha that come with getting dirty with the data provides?

Better yet, does your insurance company realize that it always needs to balance practicality with serendipity … and that balance doesn’t mean 50/50 but at times, like in recessionary times, more effort is really demanded in the adventure zone than in the practical zone.

Well, what does your insurer value? And are you concerned that a steady diet of practicality will result in your insurance company being left behind its competitors if not fading away into the history books yet to be written of once-great insurers who, well, who just couldn’t keep up in a rapidly changing marketplace?

(Re)Allocating Insurance IT Investments

on Sep 07 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: Analytics, cloud computing, insurance IT investments, legacy systems
Comments: 3 Comments »

You’ve probably all heard of something like “if you were king – or queen – for a day what would you do?” Well, if someone waved that magic wand, made me king for a day in charge of insurance IT investments and told me that my actions would stick even after the crown disappeared, I would make some changes.

First, I’d get rid of the legacy systems. You know, those core administrative systems that are 20, 30 or 40+ years old. Yeah, they work but that’s not enough. Insurers need systems that can leverage current and emerging technologies significantly quicker than their existing legacy systems.

More importantly, insurers must have core administrative systems that can meet, if not exceed, changing customer and producer expectations. I’d either rip-and-replace them or  move these core administrative systems to the cloud. Yes, I mean the whole enchilada –  we would use a ‘platform-as-a-service’ encompassing software, hardware and, of course, storage as a service.

I’d set strong SLAs and tell all of my providers to watch The Godfather several times so they would get the basic concept of the implications of missing our company-required SLAs.

Next, I’d ensure we have systems (again in the cloud) necessary to make it easy for our producers, policyholders and prospects to conduct business with the firm. I’d apologize to all of our agents and brokers for breaking  our promises to quicken the pace of onboarding, licensing, appointments and training  (not to mention quoting and rating) that we so eloquently (and often) articulated to them  but have never fulfilled.

And I’d make sure we had the systems in place to capture and send data across the value chains between their agencies or broker firms, our field staff and our home office departments by leveraging the Web and eliminating paper. Snail-mail banished. Part and parcel, I’d implement electronic signatures [it has only been legal since Clinton was president] to enable the acceleration of onboarding, business acquisition, claim management and whatever other business functions needed authorizations.

Next I’d tackle analytics. Decision-making is critical for current and long-term strategic health. That means having robust analytic capabilities. And that means we must have the systems – and competencies – to use analytics. But analytics encompasses both structured data but also unstructured content. I’d ensure we used predictive analytics for modeling – incorporating spatial intelligence (i.e. location data) – but also text data mining.

Product development, target marketing, claim management, reinsurance (what mix of ceding and assuming?) and customer service are dependent on expert use of analytics (or would be if I was king for a day). I’d build an area of analysts that were expert in statistical analysis and using the capabilities of semantic technologies.

I’d also make sure we used all of our cloud capabilities enabling our operational engines and analytic systems to work together to support eDiscovery and compliance requirements.

If I was king for a day and could reallocate my insurance company IT investments, that’s what I would do.

What would you do?