Bridging the data Divide

Not that long ago, traditional players within the insurance industry neglected to consider the potential for IT to improve operational business processes. That corporate mindset has since been supplanted by the idea that business software can successfully assist insurers in gaining a much-needed competitive edge.

And yet, many firms are still so inundated with time-consuming, paper-related tasks that they aren’t able to swiftly provide timely services to brokers and end-customers. It’s no secret that process inefficiencies will limit any organization’s ability to react to business challenges – ultimately fostering a sub-par experience for customers, employees and operations.

Is technology a cure-all for anything and everything that ails your business? Not quite. But in the face of company security and compliance concerns, coupled with employee and customer demands for real-time information access, the power of Business Intelligence (BI) software to improve business processes has never been more evident.

THE POWER OF BI

BI software is nothing new, but its power to transform operational business processes and drive integration can enable insurers to boost efficiencies and cut costs by automating key components in the underwriting process. Using an aggregated view, based on collaboration with and access to real-time transactional data, front-line workers can better attract, retain and expand relationships with their best customers. BI tools no longer focus solely on data access: now they focus more on the workers who rely on that data and the resultant business decisions they make.

Canadian insurance firms frequently say they must shift away from their traditional silos of data and move towards delivering cross-functional reports in real-time. BI has increasingly become accepted as a means to empower the company’s non-technical executives and frontline users to do just that. Integrated BI tools enable insurance firms to interact in real-time with their mission-critical data. In turn, this helps the company improve planning and decision-making, as well as better analyze critical data,minimize risk and help with compliance.

Using a BI scorecard, for example, employees can assess key metrics in a single snapshot. They can also drill down into the core data components, allowing their companies to stay competitive by delivering value across all internal and external touch points. In this way, BI helps drive sales, underwriting and operational performance, in addition to eliminating the need for customized spreadsheets. It also reduces the manual aggregation of data, resulting in better performance and trending metrics.

GOOD DECISIONS START WITH GOOD INFORMATION

These days, all too often, business executives are looking at one set of numbers while the employees in the field and in-line management are looking at a different set of numbers. Often, collecting key data consists of consolidating it through manual processes; in many cases, the data is stale as a result. There is a relatively manual, Excel-based process, for example, in which the operational numbers gradually get turned into strategic numbers. But as this process is happening, new numbers are being produced in the field, creating a fundamental disconnect between the strategic numbers and the changing reality on which they are based.

BI includes real-time technology that decreases the time lag that can develop during the process of data aggregation. Using a Web-based portal, BI allows insurance underwriters to quickly check credit scores, assess risk and analyze client value. It takes advantage of a number of the very key BI capabilities of both SharePoint and Excel. The technology merges unstructured and structured information within Outlook to enable insurance information workers to manage the underwriting process.

When used in tandem with the correct business processes, BI can help quickly provide quotes to customers, maximize customer satisfaction and minimize risk. A real-time view of key data provided by all levels of the organization automates processes and increases the organization’s agility, since the loop between decisions and results is drawn much tighter.

There is still a great deal of work to be done in the area of BI. With this in mind, Microsoft Corporation is developing a BI-related vision statement called “People-Ready,” a proposed foundation for developing BI and industry-standard technology such as Web-enabled service-oriented architectures (SOA). The intent is to integrate BI systems with an insurance company’s back-end systems, helping the company to improve product delivery to customers. Front-end BI provides an integrated user experience for exposing, accessing and working with structured and unstructured data, enabling a firm’s decision-makers to make decisions that drive better business performance.

BI has unquestionably become the competitive tool for today’s financial services organizations. Delivering good business information to decision-makers is key in reducing costs, improving operations and enhancing the overall customer experience.