Insurance is an information-driven business. It’s not information-intensive because that description totally understates the critical importance of information that flows through, among and between the value chains that are part and parcel of insurance decision-making, operations, and financial considerations. No information, no insurance business.
And the spectrum of the data rainbow just keeps lengthening. In the past we dealt with numbers and documents. Now we have to deal with e-mail, instant messaging, Tweets and quickly emerging, rich media (pictures, video, and sound).
The picture below attempts to capture the lengthening spectrum of the data rainbow.
 What’s at issue are these challenges centered around which of these data types your insurance company:
Data are not just numbers: data runs the spectrum of numbers to documents to electronic communication to rich media. What part of the data rainbow spectrum does your insurer actually see? Use?