The insurance business never has suffered from a shortage ofdata, but developing it into intelligent information has been likeharnessing the wind. As business intelligence has matured andimproved, though, insurers have been able to focus on specificneeds (with an eye out for the enterprise, as well).

BI has become more tactical in its deployment among carrierstoday, observes Novarica insurance director Matt Josefowicz. "Wedon't think that's a bad thing if you maintain an enterpriseperspective," he says. "Over the past 10 years, traditional dataprojects come from a supply-side point of view. What we are seeingnow is the evolution of demand-driven BI."

Companies need to start with a business case and then determinehow to make it actionable, explains Josefowicz. Carriers then cango back and create the infrastructure to support achieving thatbusiness goal. "If you build the infrastructure intelligently, itcan be leveraged to support other goals," he says. "The problem isyou can build a massive database with an analytic layer on top, butif no one knows what to do with it, you are not going to get anybusiness value out of it."

BI has helped Olympus Insurance to identify quickly underwritingtrends. "You set it up so you can use those key performanceindicators (KPI) and dashboards so they give you the informationthat is beneficial and meaningful," says Brad Burton, vicepresident of underwriting. "It allows us to be more nimble. We areable to react quickly. We eventually might have gotten around tosome of the decisions we made, but we were able to make themquicker because we had the information in a format we could usemore quickly."

Olympus found multiple uses for its BI application fromiPartners, including underwriting, claims management, andmarketing. The carrier distributes its products through independentagencies with several hundred agents to track. The dashboardsdeliver production and loss experience in a quick and efficientway, indicates Burton.

"We are looking at a way to give the agents their own individualdashboard," he says. "We have a lot of tweaking still to do becausethere always is something else people want to see."

Celina Insurance Group employs about 150 staffers, and DuaneKimball, vice president of data management, estimates 20 percent ofthose employees use the carrier's BI solution. Of that group, hefeels between half and two thirds are regular users. "With the oldsolution, there may have been a handful of users sometime duringthe course of a year," says Kimball.

Celina mapped out what the carrier wanted users to see and howthey wanted to see it. "We had a great deal of interaction [withbusiness users] to make sure it was their product and not [IT'sproduct]," says Kimball. "It wasn't a matter of what I wanted tosee out there; it was what the business needed to do its job."

Celina uses the BI tool for personnel management that involvesworkflows and managing assignments. It also uses the tool to drilldown into the data to find claims with reserves over a specificdollar amount, putting that information at users' fingertips,according to Ted Wissman, vice president of claims for the carrier.When the remnants of Hurricane Ike blew through the Midwest inSeptember, Celina was able to update those claims and validate themusing the new solution. "We could sort by data loss, the amountpaid, or whether a CAT code was assigned to it with checks andbalances to make sure the claims were properly identified," hesays. "Those were tedious, paper-intensive processes, but withiPartners, once the data file goes out, we go through a simpleprocess of validating the numbers. It takes us a lot less time, andthe information is 100 percent accurate."

Celina also manages its assignments for adjusters on a dailybasis to make sure the claims are going where they are supposed to,and the carrier watches pending losses and looks at differentcoverages, according to Wissman. The company does not yet use itsBI tool to assess severity of claims, but with small carriersseverity numbers can have great impact in the short term, so thatis another change that will come from the solution.

Robert Pickering claims AAA Allied Group is no different thanother companies in dealing with workers reluctant to embrace newtechnology. "Everybody was used to the individualized, customizedversion of the report that showed only the information [that personwas] interested in," says Pickering, vice president of informationservices for the company.

As Pickering and his team educated the business lines on theamount of effort required on the back end to maintain all thosereports, he received business-line support to explain theinformation was there but needed to be manipulated in a new way."These are new tool sets, and with new tool sets come education,"he says.

AAA Allied Group also was rolling out SharePoint as a portaltechnology at the same time, adds Pickering. "So, a lot of thechange we are able to push on folks is a result of the way wedisseminate information as a whole," he says. "This is just anotherpiece of that change."

Celina had a data warehouse solution in place before selectingits BI solution, but it required a lot of maintenance and expertiseKimball didn't think the carrier had on staff. "My main thinkingwas the warehouse should be a tool to enable the managers of ourcompany to do their jobs easily and quickly," he says.

Wissman felt the business users were ready for a change. "[Theold system] was burdensome for the end user to drill down into thedata," he says. "The iPartners solution works well for us."

Business intelligence has given Olympus a wider range ofinformation in a much more efficient fashion, notes Burton. Olympusoutsources its policy processing, so the carrier doesn't have ITin-house or anyone creating reports or data management analysis."We normally would have to get that through our vendor, but it hasother clients, so getting the information is not always asefficient as it needs to be or done in a timely manner," saysBurton.

There were three steps taken by Olympus: identify what wasneeded, get it out in a format where its vendor could grab it, andthen start assembling the dashboards and the KPI the carrier neededto see.

Its latest vendor partnership, though, has given Olympus what itneeds: a wide range of information in a very timely manner. "We'vecreated key performance indicators and a lot of differentdashboards that are pertinent to each facet of thebusiness--underwriting, claims, marketing--that we can use on adaily basis and some of it on a monthly basis, depending on theneed," says Burton. "We're able to get a great deal of knowledgequickly and at a click. Before we had to create the reports andqueries; they were more cumbersome on our part to get done.

AAA Allied Group attacked its information issues from twoangles--IT and the business side, according to Pickering. "From atechnology standpoint, we were looking to find a way of maintainingour reporting environment for the BI information we present to ourmanagement," he says.

AAA's IT team was spending a considerable amount of timesupporting, changing, and altering existing reports along withcreating new ones. "I was desperate to find a solution that wouldput report creation in the hands of the people who had the mostinformation about the business," he says.

As Unitrin Direct rolled out the BI tool from SAS, IT and thebusiness partnered together to create a repository of data that endusers could access for reporting on and monitoring businessperformance, according to Shaun McGovern, director of productmanagement for the carrier.

IT provides cleansed data at a granular level, explainsMcGovern. Analysts from the business side can access thisinformation on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis to createtheir own summarized versions for generating reports that are sentout to end users, management, and senior management.

"We've been working on productionizing the reporting process somany of the month-end and quarter-end reports can be generated anddistributed quickly for people's viewing pleasure," he says.

Unitrin Direct collects a large amount of data on a monthlybasis and needs to turn it into useful information for analyticaland business purposes. The metrics are put on the summarizedversions of the data, continues McGovern.

Some business users want to see the summarized data in an Exceltable, and others want to see it in a report in a PDF file format.Unitrin's BI tool allows the carrier to disseminate the informationeither way, relates McGovern.

"We have analysts in each department to help do more ad hocreporting once we see the monthly data," he says. "They see whetherthere are any anomalies in the data or any issues we see with newbusiness we are writing. It forces us to look deeper at the data,and we have the ability to go back to the more granular data setsand start doing more ad hoc analysis."

Thomas Vaughan, vice president of marketing for AAA AlliedGroup, points out two issues needed to be resolved from a businessstandpoint. "If you look at it in terms of how people spend theirtime, we found middle management spent an inordinate amount of timecollecting, organizing, interpreting, and subsequently distributinginformation," he says.

As the business users became more reliant on information, theyhad to spend a higher percentage of their time going through thosefour steps. "They reach a certain point where their productivity isdeclining," says Vaughan. "We needed a way to automate that processto find what information they are utilizing on a regular basis, howthey typically organize it to be useful, how we can change the wayit is presented so it is easier to interpret, and then automate thedistribution of it. As we worked with [Pickering] and his team, wewere looking at solutions that could stabilize the reportgeneration process and go deeper into the process to what's donewith the information."

The second issue AAA Allied Group faced was the determination todevelop an additional tool set to look at data across theenterprise as opposed to the vertical business-line data sets usershad been accustomed to, continues Vaughan.

The challenge AAA and other insurers face was the data experts,who knew where the data was and how it was being stored, from anarchitectural standpoint, were in information systems, according toPickering. But the BI knowledge was with the end user. What TableauSoftware allowed AAA to do was teach the business users a differentway of accessing the data and give them the tools to manipulate thedata to get the answers they were looking for, adds Pickering.

"From a much broader view, we are taking all the custom reportsand converting those into Tableau reports on the back end, and wethen publish a high-level report with all the data in it and givethe individuals who use those reports the ability to consumethrough our SharePoint portal or through a different type ofTableau Web license and manipulate the data themselves," hesays.

Kimball sees more enhancements coming at Celina, particularlywith Wissman's wish list for the claims department. "We wanted togo into it slowly to make sure it was doing what it was supposed todo," he says. "I didn't want it to turn into a situation where onlya handful of people were using it. My focus here was trying to comeup with something that allows you to drill down instead of drillingup, which is a tendency we have around here--and that it beused."

Pickering believes the biggest success story for his company'simplementation has been the ability to give business users a widerview of the environment.

"Before, they only got information at a very micro level, and aswe've been rolling out broader-range reports that allow them todrill down to the information, they see the information in a moremacro viewpoint, and it gives them more appreciation for the restof the business," he says. "You now see people collaborating moreoften because they have information at their fingertips they didn'thave available before. It gives them more appreciation of a supportcenter or a supporting business line."

The tool from SAS still is relatively new for Unitrin Direct,and the carrier is discovering capabilities it previously didn'tknow existed. "That's been very helpful from a reportingcapability," McGovern says. "We want to update reports and get themout as soon as they are available."

The BI tool has made some aspects of the job easier, butMcGovern notes a lot of work remains involving the creation ofaccurate reports. "You have to spend a fair amount of time buildingreports, checking the data, and verifying everything before yousend it out," he says. "The great thing is we have the tool to doit. It's been a win for our department to drill down in the dataand take a look at how the business actually is performing."