Insurance: Strategic IT Investment Critical to Competitive Edge

Jason King

Director of Financial Services and Insurance

Hyland Software, Inc.

Welcome Jason. How important right now is strategic IT investments for carriers?

In this current soft environment, strategic IT investment should actually be more of a priority than it has been in the past. Carriers need to think about being bigger, leaner, and stronger. It is a good time to look at IT investment and think of getting more bang for the buck. Will the investment also provide long-term gains? An investment in enterprise content management, for instance, provides ROI in the short term, but it also has long-term benefits as it helps carriers become more efficient as well as stronger and leaner in their operations.

What is your advice on goals?

When making an IT investment, the goals should be fourfold: 1) gaining operational efficiencies; 2) improving service to increase both customers and customer satisfaction; 3) increasing channels of distribution to allow better access between the carrier and the producer network; and finally 4) ensuring compliance. If the IT investment meets these criteria, then the carrier can safely say it is on the right track.

What should companies avoid doing?

We have seen a lot of organizations look for a quick fix. While the technology investment should be able to take care of the immediate pain the carrier is experiencing, it is critical that the technology be able to grow incrementally as the carrier’s needs grow. Carriers need to look beyond just a point solution to handle a specific pain. They need to go beyond the efficiencies and ask themselves what they can do besides getting rid of paper from the claims process, for example. They need to think bigger. They also need to think strategically about how to leverage the investment across the enterprise.

New capabilities?

What is probably the most useful capability for carriers is that they now have the ability to increase communication between products and interested parties in a standard way without incurring additional costs. I would also add Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as it has helped change the game for content management and collaboration software.