The issue of enterprise content management has been kicked around home offices for years and while you would have a hard time finding someone who doesn't think ECM is a good idea, there remains a significant number of insurance carriers that have chosen to delay implementing such a system.
In a conversation with Bob Hyle, editor-in-chief of Tech Decisions as part of the magazine's summer podcast series, Forrester senior analyst Ellen Carney believes executive sponsorship is one reason some carriers have refrained from adopting ECM.
(To hear their full conversation, click on the podcast link.)
Carney believes IT invariably ends up holding the short straw of owning the enterprise content strategy.
"It goes back to executive sponsorship," she says. "An initiative like this needs someone from the top taking it from a leadership perspective and articulating how it fits into the business strategy."
Carney also believes the technology vendors selling ECM systems are not selling the right value proposition to insurers at this point in time.
"[Vendors] are talking about ways for carriers to be more efficient and drive productivity when they should be telling carriers about how ECM can produce data to help the carrier grow business lines," she says.
Carney doesn't look at the ECM hurdles as technology issues, but surmises it could be considered a technology delivery problem that is the issue. Also, she feels there are some cultural factors in place.
"One of the ongoing philosophical debates is the fair degree of tension between the IT organization and the business," she says. "Solutions that can deliver ECM as a SaaS model or as a managed services model and take it off the plate of the IT organization would be ideal."
