Insurance House Integrates Data, Sets Sight on Business Intelligence

For many insurers, analyzing policy and claims data pulled from disparate systems is no easy feat. In search of an enterprise data model and warehouse, Insurance House partnered with Skywire Software based in Frisco, Texas. Internal reports and product design analytics are now produced in near real-time, and the reduced integration costs have allowed the insurer to reduce IT headcount by half.

Insurance House comprises a property and casualty (P&C) insurance carrier, a Managing General Agency (MGA), and a premium finance organization whose operations extend throughout the southeastern and mid-Atlantic states. Like many companies, its data is stored in disparate systems across its three business units, making it difficult to get a single view of the truth.

CIO Robert Golden says Insurance House plans to leverage INSight not just for data warehousing, but also to perform business intelligence in the future.

In 2005, the company decided to procure a solution that could model the data to a standard P&C format and import it into a data warehouse. After acquiring and deploying Skywire Software’s INSight data model, Insurance House found the solution could do much more to help the company gain competitive advantage.

Prior to beginning the implementation of INSight, obtaining accurate, consistent information across the enterprise was a challenge for the company. This task was manually intensive, time consuming, costly and often prone to error.

It used to take a dedicated resource up to a week to produce a series of month-end reports. Now the report is populated daily, and any changes from the previous day are assembled in a manner in which analytic and static reporting can be done easily.

“We’ve basically been able to free up a full FTE to go deeper in other areas of our data warehouse and data management team,” says Robert Golden, chief information officer at Insurance House. “That’s pretty big for us, because we don’t have a huge data management staff.”

Golden says the company plans to leverage INSight not just for data warehousing, but also to perform business intelligence in the future. As a regional carrier, the company must be able to identify territories where the company can compete effectively with large standard carriers. Insurance House intends to use INSight’s reporting and analytic applications to analyze its data and obtain the information it needs to develop the right products and set competitive rates for a particular sector and territory.

Implementation time and cost were the two key factors Insurance House considered when choosing a solution, but the company found that the functionality in INSight delivered far more value for money than other solutions on the market. For starters, P&C technologists and business users designed INSight’s data model, so it offers a unique ability to meet the needs of companies like Insurance House. The solution also includes tools that make it easy to load the data into the warehouse once it is mapped.

While the initial rollout of the data model and warehouse went smoothly, Insurance House had to overcome a significant challenge faced by many long-established firms: the lack of data governance. “We had to make some very hard decisions about how far back to go,” says Golden. “Where we had missing pieces to the total data picture, we had to create and strategically match offset records to make sure we had a full lifecycle of a policy or an endorsement.”

Since beginning the first phase of the project, Insurance House has loaded the last five years of policy data from legacy systems onto INSight. Now it is consolidating two policy administration systems down to one and expanding the link to more products and states. The company plans to use additional rating, rules and underwriting tools in conjunction with INSight to leverage the data and set up rating algorithms and structures.

Insurance House has been a Microsoft enterprise customer since 2004, so INSight’s Microsoft compatibility was an important advantage. “Standardizing on the .NET platform and SQL as our database language gave us a lot of interoperability, and it actually helps me to extend my resources a little further,” says Golden. “The INSight tools are also Microsoft compatible, so it’s been a real nice fit for us in terms of not having to do a lot of conversions.”

Perhaps most important, the implementation of the INSight solution has inspired confidence in IT’s ability to help drive the strategic direction of the company. Nowadays, IT department members are invited to most meetings to provide input on how to get to where the company wants to go using technology as an enabler.

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