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“What we have here is a failure to communicate”

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

From my latest column in Insurance Networking News:

More than 40 years ago, Paul Newman’s prison guard in the film, “Cool Hand Luke,” made famous the phrase, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Yet, today, a quick Google search of the phrase will pull up more than 400,000 hits.

With the quantum leaps in communication technology over the last 10 years, the failure to communicate effectively has become a mortal sin, whether you’re talking about communication within an organization or between an organization and its partners or customers.

…

But enabling this kind of communication takes changes in practices and behaviors as well as technology. In addition to its impact on customer and agent communication, these changed expectations have a significant potential impact on the way IT leaders will manage their own organizations and their relationships with their business counterparts, in four key areas: information accessibility, skills inventory, activity transparency and customer communication with business counterparts.

Read the complete article here.

Posted in Article Links, Innovation, Insurance, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Information Security and Analytics

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

Speaking in a recent article in Insurance Networking News on Cloud Computing and Security, analyst Tse Wei Lim pointed out that analytics and the increasing trend information accessibility has its own, more pressing security challenges.

Tse Wei Lim, an analyst in the insurance practice at New York-based Novarica, agrees that cloud computing has broad security implications but argues that it is not widely adopted enough in the insurance industry to have immediate ramifications. Rather, he sees the widespread use of analytics as a more pressing security concern. “The next big thing that CIOs will need to worry about is the increasingly pervasive use of analytics and BI tools at all levels of their organization,” he says. “As insurers begin to see the benefits of analytics, and the tools become more powerful and more affordable, IT departments will begin to see greater demand from the business side for more data to be made more widely available. The security challenge then will be for CIOs to work out how to satisfy this demand while keeping that data secure.”

For more of Tse Wei’s work on this topic, see this report.

Posted in Article Links, IT Strategy, Insurance | No Comments »

“IT Investment to the Rescue”

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

Nice wrap-up series by Anthony O’Donnell at I&T called IT Investment to the Rescue. Excerpt below, click for full article at I&T.

“Rates are not growing, [and] the market is shrinking due to poor performance across the economy,” observes Matthew Josefowicz, head of Novarica’s (New York) insurance practice. “Carriers will have to ’steal’ market share from others by providing better pricing or service, and IT is at the bottom of that.”

The competitive realities of economically challenging times are not new, but this time around other factors are intensifying the need to react, suggests Josefowicz. While “flexibility” and “agility” have long been buzzwords in the insurance technology marketing lexicon, for example, the velocity at which the economy plunged during the crisis showed just how important these qualities are to the insurance enterprise. Even now, Josefowicz comments, “Few insurers’ infrastructures are optimized to support rapid shifts in business strategy.”

Carriers similarly find themselves challenged to keep up with customer expectations when it comes to technology. Today’s personal technology has outstripped business technology, with enormous consequences for both consumer-facing technology and the internal work environment. “It’s easier for people to find information and conduct transactions in their personal lives than through enterprise technology,” Josefowicz notes. “That’s a major change.”

Posted in Article Links, IT Spending, IT Strategy | No Comments »

IT Changes Everything

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Insurer operating models were not carved on stone tablets. They were developed in response to the limits of the available information technology at the time.

Insurers should periodically ask themselves not just how they can do their current tasks better, faster and cheaper, but why they do them at all, and whether those reasons are still valid given the current state of information technology. They may well be, but not asking the questions ensures that insurers will miss opportunities to change the game in their favor.

From my article, IT Changes Everything, Insurance Networking News, December 2009

For more, see our webinar on Paradigm Shifts in IT and Insurance.

Posted in Article Links, IT Strategy, Insurance | No Comments »

CIO Job Description

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Today’s CIO “has to be a politician, a communicator, a team leader and a business strategist — all while being knowledgeable of the technology that is in place today and might be in place tomorrow.”

- Matthew Josefowicz, quoted in I&T

Posted in Article Links, Insurance | No Comments »

Online Video Interview at I&T

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Matthew Josefowicz interviewed by Kathy Burger of Insurance & Technology Magazine

Posted in Article Links, IT Spending, IT Strategy, Insurance, Webinars | No Comments »

Why Legacy is a Bad Word

Friday, August 21st, 2009

The problem with Mainframe/COBOL systems is not that they’re bad at what they do. The problem is that for most applications built on this stack more than 10 years ago, its really hard to make them do something new.

A recent blog post at INN asked “Why is Legacy a Bad Word?”, pointing out that, “80% of the world’s data still resides on mainframe systems” and that most major computing applications at banks, government, etc are still COBOL/mainframe.

This made me think of a common misunderstanding that crops up when we discuss mainframe/COBOL “legacy systems” with our advisory clients. As people who’ve worked with these systems for years know, they are (generally) very stable and scalable.

The big problem is not legacy platforms, if by platform you mean the OS/390 operating system and COBOL programming language. These are both solid technologies. They will not “expire” or blow up or die of old age.

The big problem is legacy applications, which means applications that are:

Poorly documented and incompletely understood by the people responsible for maintaining them.
Poorly structured, so that business logic, business rules, data management, and presentation layers are all mixed together in linear, non-reusable code.
Designed to perform certain tasks specified at the point of creation, not to adapt to changing needs and requirements.

Legacy applications were built by legacy employees to support legacy operations. If you still have the same employees to maintain them and the same operations for them to support, legacy applications are not a problem.

But if your business practices are evolving (new products, new channels, new internal operations and workflow), then legacy applications are often a major inhibitor.

Posted in Article Links, IT Strategy, Policy Administration Systems | No Comments »

New Rating Factor: Drive Thrus?

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Here’s a fun factoid from a new study by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, reported by the NY Daily News: 80% of car accidents involve on of the drivers eating or drinking while driving.

Coffee is the worst, bringing new meaning to the adage “don’t drink and drive.”

“Even with a travel lid, hot coffee can find its way out of the opening when you hit a bump,” the study said.

The study puts the other culprits in this order: soup, tacos, chili dogs, hamburgers, ribs and wings, fried chicken, jelly doughnuts, soda and chocolate.

Just another interesting example of seemingly unrelated factors that might make their way into an underwriting algorithm someday. Someday your GIS might alert your insurer when you stop at the drive-thru and trigger a premium increase.

Posted in Article Links | No Comments »

Interview in Technology Decisions

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Tech Dec kicks off its Summer 2009 Online Analyst Series with an interview with yours truly on current trends and issues for insurance IT in this economy.

Stay tuned for the webinar on July 30 at 2 pm.

Posted in Article Links, IT Spending, IT Strategy, Webinars | No Comments »

More transparency for health insurance coming?

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Democrats on the House Ways & Means committee Rangel, Miller, and Waxman have introduced their own draft proposal for overhauling healthcare. One interesting note, as reported this morning by Bloomberg:

The plan would create an online “health exchange” where consumers could shop for coverage, and establish a federal advisory committee that would determine “minimum benefits” offered through that system.

In addition to the interesting question of who would build and run this exchange (vendors, start your lobbying!), the potential impact that this would have on the agent distribution channel for individual and small group health insurance would be huge. Health insurers that haven’t already started preparing for a growth in direct distribution should take this as a wake up call.

Posted in Article Links, Economy, eBusiness | No Comments »

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