Insurance Networking News: Executive Strategies for Technology Management articles from February 2009

Insurance Networking News: Executive Strategies for Technology Management archives from February 2009

Insurers Move Warily Beyond the Waterfall; As Web services become more prevalent, project managers are embracing agile development methodologies.(FEATURE: IT Project Management)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Bill Kenealy Insurers historically raced to deploy the latest information technologies, yet they continued to rely on older, established methodologies to build the internal business applications that they installed on those...

Market Downturn Provides Opportunity for Analytics.(Industry Priorities)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Mark Gorman In research conducted this summer on behalf of Insurance Networking News, I asked about the use of predictive analytics in new and renewal business underwriting. While the results are a bit overstated (obviously only...

Time to Retire Retro Reconciliation Tools? As data and compliance needs change, carriers are looking to automate one of the last bastions of manual processing.(Back Office)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Bill Kenealy Despite being one of the most fundamental business processes an insurance company performs, reconciliation retains a relatively low-tech reputation. This seems especially true if reconciliation is held up against other...

Solutions.(Bottomline Technologies Inc.)(Perceptive Software Group Inc. to introduce ImageNow 6.2)(Informative Graphics Corp. to release latest version of Brava software)
February 1, 2009... BOTTOMLINE TECH COMPLETES AUDIT FOR LEGAL EXCHANGE Bottomline Technologies, Portsmouth, N.H., a provider of collaborative payment, invoice and document automation solutions, announced that it has successfully completed the SAS 70 Type I...

Clearing ECM's Name; More than just a technology, enterprise content management is a business strategy to successfully drive insurers into the future.(Vantage Point)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Jason King No matter what you call it, enterprise content management (ECM) solutions (in all their incarnations) capture, manage, secure, store and distribute content. And by doing so, ECM emerges as more than just a technology -...

IT Spend Must be Smart in 2009; A new report warns that insurers must be diligent with all expenditures, especially IT, in the face of this economic downturn.(Insurancenetworking.com)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Alex Vorro As insurers dive deeper into an economic downturn - replete with the credit crisis and skittish stock markets - investment returns, written premium and operating income all are down record amounts. This is the message...

MARKETING TOOLS: Know Your Customer and Segment Accordingly; Carriers seeking to boost profitability and retain customers are segmenting with greater sophistication.(Front Office)(Company overview)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Daniel Joelson To beat their competitors, carriers need an overarching view of their customer data to discover new marketing and cross-selling opportunities. Some insurers have started to use predictive modeling and other...

INNFOCUS-HEALTH: Hidden Riches Revealed; Health insurers are finding ways to create operational and customer value from the technologies used for security and integrity of data.(INNFocus-Health)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Pat Speer As financial pressures mount, some insurers are suspending - and sometimes killing - major IT initiatives, save privacy and security technologies. But some health care insurers are deploying these technologies to not only...

Casting Off Anxiety.(Commentary)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Pat Speer, Editor-In-Chief It is said the only constant is change. During the course of its history, the insurance industry has experienced numerous business cycles, cruising slowly, cautiously and conservatively through soft and...

Solutions.(Front Office)(Company overview)
February 1, 2009... ENHANCED UNDERWRITING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM FirstBest Systems Inc., Bedford, Mass., provider of advanced underwriting management systems (UMS) designed to enable commercial insurance carriers to write more and better business, announced...

What's Driving IT Spend?(Statistically Speaking)(Survey)
February 1, 2009... Despite many experts and carriers foreseeing a flattening of IT spending by insurers in 2009, property/casualty carriers continue to seek new ways to creatively deliver solutions to their customers. This is the message from Fiserv Insurance...

Solutions.(INNFocus-Health)
February 1, 2009... CONNECTURE LAUNCHES INSURECONNECT EZ Connecture Inc., an Atlanta provider of Web-based sales, service and process automation solutions to the health insurance industry, released InsureConnect EZ, a turnkey sales automation solution that...

Core System Conundrum; Insurers - especially in the current down economy - have a tough decision ahead of them: What to do with policy admin systems.(INNFocus-Health)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Chad Hersh As the economic roller coaster continues, insurers, as a whole, have weathered the storm extraordinarily well. Though there certainly have been casualties, compared to banking and securities firms, insurance companies...

Economy and Technology will Alter Underwriting; Insurers that invested wisely in underwriting projects will emerge from the market downturn better positioned in the year ahead.(Industry Priorities)(Industry overview)
February 1, 2009... Byline: Mark Gorman With the difficulties in 2008's credit market providing the background, 2009 promises to be a challenging year for insurance underwriters. Interestingly, while the market will certainly be volatile, the work done in the...