Bridging the Divides

on Aug 24 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: content management, document management, Information, knowledge management, Operational Data, semantic web, Structured Data, Unstructured Data
Comments: 1 Comment »

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I thought the “great divide” insurers faced was bridging operations and information. Operations – policy administration, billing, claims, producer onboarding and compensation, reinsurance and so forth - kept the business going while information extracted from those functional processes and other sources fueled decisions.

Oh for the good old days.

We really haven’t solved the operational / informational divide but the rapidly emerging Digital Marketplace has uncovered a divide that had always existed but has now taken on more urgency: the divide between structured data and unstructured data.

Structured & Unstructured Data

Structured data we know and sometimes love: numbers, spreadsheets, databases, … But unstructured data is all around us in the insurance value chains including but certainly not limited to:

•  E-mails from external stakeholders (I’m referring to policyholders, prospects, producers, regulators and reinsurers) to insurance company personnel
• E-mails within the value chains of the insurance company (from one or more employees to other employees)
• Phone calls within and between stakeholders whether internally or externally or some combination
• Policy application forms in some state of completeness
• Product development forms
• Claim adjuster forms 
• Claim adjuster pictures or videos
• Instant messages
• Tweets (yes, tweets within and between stakeholders)
• And, well you get the idea.

This divide must be solved sooner than later. And the solutions rests with understanding the importance of investing in capabilities that enable the insurance company to mix, merge or otherwise blend, and access structured and unstructured data into one coherent data repository … and, of course, be able to visualize the results of the queries in a way that leads to effective and efficient decision-making.

What is your insurance company doing to bridge the structured / unstructured data gap?

Release Your Imprisoned Data !!

on Aug 22 by Barry Rabkin
Tags: content management, document management, knowledge management, semantic web
Comments: 3 Comments »

Insurance companies could fuel years, if not decades, of rip-roaring bonfires with their inventory of hard-copy documents. Every department from underwriting to claims to legal (and for life insurers, medical) and other functional departments all have mountains of documents stored in file cabinets and desk drawers too numerous to count.

Each one of those documents encompasses significant information assets crying out to be freed from their paper prisons and released into a coherent digital infrastructure. As long as the information is held prisoner in their forms, only the jailer can access and use the assets frozen in place. Sharing across departments is done infrequently if at all. Sharing throughout the value chains that touch the field staff, producers, regulators and reinsurers is done mostly at the proverbial point of a gun.

Be Free, Data, Be Free!!

If all the data were set free from their hard-copy prisons and poured into coherent data structures that were tagged and searchable throughout the insurance company (including by stakeholders across all the value chains), what might we want to do?

• Perhaps we could tag the various products with the terms, conditions, restrictions, endorsements or riders (depending on the flavor of insurance we are talking about) so that someone could search on any one of those attributes, Or
• Each set of claim information could have descriptions of what the claim adjuster was thinking when s/he saw the loss occurrence – something relating to the magnitude of the impact or loss of the claimant’s property, Or
• Product forms could have descriptions relating to why the product was created, the markets the insurer wanted to penetrate and the competitors the insurer was striving to gain market share from with that specific product
• Underwriters could possibly attribute why they had stipulated the acceptance or rejection criteria for each product
• Campaign data assets might have descriptions by the marketing department relating to the purpose and scope of each specific campaign
• Customer service personnel could describe the tone and nature of the calls they have received from policyholders, prospects and producers for each communication event

What would you want to do or expect if your insurance company data were thawed out from their frozen cells and released into a collaborative environment?