Insurance: Strategic IT Investment Critical to Competitive Edge

Stephen A. Bruno

President and Chief Executive Officer

Computer Solutions & Software International

CSSI’s Stephen Bruno, let’s go to you. How would you rank strategic IT investment right now?

Essential. Carriers are facing a quickly changing business environment, where agility and adaptability are necessary to future sustainability. Due to the sophistication of the insurance business model, there’s little chance that deferred projects can be rushed into production in a just-in-time fashion. Even in these lean times, organizations need to plan and invest for long-term goals. Additionally, innovative technology solutions form the foundation that will prepare an organization for the changes that lie ahead both during the downslide and during the recovery. Companies with a reliable business technology platform in place will be poised to be competitive in the eventual upswing.

Your thoughts on goals Stephen?

The goals for insurance carriers should be to improve operational efficiency and optimize their sales efforts. A carrier’s people are its most valuable resource, so a business-critical objective is to retain and proactively manage the best talent, keeping them focused on the organization’s objectives. Communicating goals and providing real-time performance measurement influences the behavior of producer groups and motivates the various distribution channels to achieve the goals set forth by executive management.

What should companies not do right now?

A common reaction to revenue uncertainty is to make across-the-board IT cuts. A better approach is prioritization. Carriers should avoid those initiatives that will yield only short-term results and take important assets away from projects that can deliver long-term advantages.

New capabilities?

With ever-increasing consumer demands for instant access to service, carriers are focusing more than ever on ways of using technology to provide high-quality self-service experiences. Carriers are continuing to adopt relationship management solutions in an effort to provide better service, both internally to their agents and externally to brokers and customers. More forward-thinking carriers are looking to implement a comprehensive strategy; a fully-integrated approach that manages the entire sales cycle from point of contact, to online enrollment, to paying broker commissions and managing renewals. We’ve engineered our own VUE Compensation Management suite to this design and have found that a full integration of the cycle is readily attainable by having the company’s products, insureds, policies, groups and producers all in one place.