Insurers Can Find Sunshine in the Cloud

Thursday, Jul 02,2009, 12:17:55 PM Click:

Carriers willing to consider replacing the old systems and cloud initiatives can generate numerous benefits.

Insurance organizations continue to face myriad challenges, even if the economy shows small glimmers of recovery. While executives of the insurance in 2008 were often forced to make decisions reactive May 2009 the capabilities of these same leaders proactively for opportunities to improve basic operations.

Driven by the need both to innovate and reduce costs, most insurers consider cloud computing as a strategic initiative.

Cloud computing dramatically alters the current technology business model to deliver speed, cost savings and agility to insurers. By putting processes and data "in the cloud," issues such as servers, capacity, stacks, data-backup and disaster recovery are outsourced, saving expense and enabling insurers to focus on innovation.

Analyzing where cloud computing can impact your team's performance depends upon a frank assessment of your current processes and the underlying technologies. Ask these questions:

* How do we manage agent administration, total agent care and on-boarding processes?

* How integrated are our policy administration processes?

* How deep is our policyholder knowledge?

* Can we accurately track field sales forecasting, pipeline and sales visibility?

* Is our customer service management fully integrated?

* How automated is our policy quote processes?

Creating a technology blueprint of your organization's current state will help to begin the process of defining where cloud computing can augment or replace legacy technology solutions. For insurers who can effectively identify specific sub-processes in quote, claims, policy administration or agency management, well-designed cloud-based solutions can mirror industry specific solutions while offering broader flexibility and scalability.

Cloud computing, partnered with a supporting IT environment, enables firms to exponentially power their business platforms as new initiatives occur in a fraction of the time compared to a traditional IT approach. The cloud computing approach delivers speed and agility for the insurance organization, enabling them to easily adapt to changing business environments.

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In the past, cloud computing has typically been associated with lighter applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) or sales force automation (SFA). However, acceptance is rapidly growing among insurers to look at cloud-computing solutions for areas of operations once considered too mission critical. For example, policy administration supporting the end-to-end lifecycle management of policyholders is typically one of the most expensive operating areas for carriers and underwriters.

Cloud-based policy administration is a great example of a vertically integrated set of complex workflows that reflect the growing maturation of cloud computing solutions as strategic initiatives for insurers.

Not all cloud computing advantages are financial- or solution-based. New intuitive cloud computing components are being added, which can breathe life into core functions. For example, Salesforce.com just released its Genius feature which, much like Apple's iTunes feature of the same name, can aggregate customers with similar characteristics to provide an insurer with key data to help drive future product, marketing and sales decisions.

The potential is very avant-garde for the insurance to look at the sacred cows of their business model of the company and ask: "Is it possible to make faster, easier, cheaper "By leveraging the clouds, in conjunction with computers is a cloud computing consulting partners, insurance companies can benefit from increased productivity and profitability - with a more affordable . Insurers innovative take advantage of cloud computing in May to find the sun, even in the business climate.

Randy Rodriguez is the Chief Financial Services Innovation Bluewolf Inc., New York.