Insurance Technology Investments Yield Positive Returns for Industry

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The ante has gone up. Instead of investing to create a competitive advantage, it is becoming necessary to invest to avoid losing ground.

With non-exclusive Brokers, the ease of doing business makes convenience a surrogate for loyalty.

However, Legacy systems are not the defacto impediment. Integration is a primary issue – how to tie various information sources together and how to share information.

The impediment seems to be tools and skills for integrating the Legacy world with the web and web-services world. Companies are typically faced with making huge investments (and commitments)in traing for new development skills and rewriting applications in order to deliver web-based solutions. This often leads to supporting two separate development environments.

In addition, the new programming languages can take 18 months to become proficient, if the legacy Developers make the transition. hiring new skills leaves a void of the ‘intellectual capital’ resident with the legacy Developers.

Along with the technical decision comes the business decision. Can organizations afford to postpone business solutions while re-training skill sets?

There is another alternative.

- Union Pacific Railroad Employee Health Systems securely place Memeber services, claimes, eligibility, prescription refills, and more) one the Internet.

- Reliant General Insurance validated driving records against a third-party database in real-time for improved risk ratings with on-line auto insurance applications.

- OMS National Insurance Corporation delivers policies to their brokers electroncially through a secure report portal.

What do these organizations have in common? One, they are (or were) traditional legacy environemnts and used legacy skill-sets to deliver these solutions; two, ADVANCED BusinessLink software that makes it easy to bridge the Legacy and Web Worlds; and three, an inclination to act.

It can be done without the equivalent of the Farmer’s Insurance IT Budget. (although Farmer’s Insurance used this same technology to modernize applications and improve services for their their network of 6,000 Brokers.)

IT solutions aren’t the source of intellectual capital, but they do allow organizations to leverage intellectual capital further.

John McNally
ADVANCED BusinessLink
john.mcnally@businesslink.com