Inside thoughts. Those issues that keep you up at night. Challenges that you face every day as an insurance professional. That’s what INSide Thoughts is all about. We’re here to dialogue with you about opportunities, challenges, and finding solutions. Hey, we may even work in some humor. Our hope is, at the end of the day, we will have inspired you to try a new approach, look for a new solution, or simply made you think. We’ll share our INSide Thoughts with you to help you gain a new perspective on your insurance company.
When I mention CRM systems, do some of you cringe? I understand the feeling. I am experienced (old) enough to remember the first attempt at CRM systems in the P&C industry.
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It’s been roughly 10 years since those world-famous programming gurus came out of the Wasatch mountains of Utah preaching revolution with something called the “agile manifesto.” And in the custom software development world there indeed has been a revolution of sorts.
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We humans aren’t always up for change as evidenced by Newton’s laws.
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In this three-part blog series, I’m comparing insurance to manufacturing. I’ve talked about the key breakthrough in insurance software of the separation of product from policy. And I’ve addressed how the product itself needs an unambiguous way of being defined — the product model— to get to one version of the truth for both IT and business people. Now let’s consider the beginning of the product, that is, its “supply chain.”
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In my previous blog, I compared insurance to manufacturing (to a degree) and talked about the key breakthrough in insurance software—the separation of product from policy. But what is an insurance product, at least in respect to systems automation?
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What industry do you know that is primarily a business of decision making? This business doesn’t build products … it doesn’t ship hard goods … it doesn’t provide a service that is consumed by its clients. But it does provide a highly valuable service when called upon. And what business do you know that has arguably more historical data about past decisions than other industries?
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Vendor software packages have really improved their architecture over the last several years is by providing the capability in their policy admin systems for companies to “drop” in very specific product information along with associated variations into a very generic transaction system.
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You can’t swing an optical mouse nowadays without hitting an article about business intelligence (BI). It’s all the rage and rightly so. With the countless sources of data available to companies, analytics are critical to making well-informed decisions.
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I recently read that this year’s storms, together with the earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand have caused $55 billion in insured losses. That amount is twice the cat losses of the first half of 2010 and four times the 10-year average.
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Recently, Wipfli formalized its consulting practices to include a focus on serving the insurance industry. I’m proud to be part of this effort, and proud to have spent the better part of 30 years in insurance. The insurance industry I know is made up of quality, honest, helpful people performing a valuable service.
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