With all the great minds in corporate IT departments,you would think innovation would be driven from the business worldto consumers, but that hardly seems the case these days. Mostpeople can do more on their laptop in front of their 3D televisionscreen at home than they can in their cubicle with the companyPC.

In his blog on the CIO Dashboard, Chris Curran asks whythis is so. He and co-worker Henry Hwangbo came up with fivereasons for this lack of development skills:

o IT has the wrong skill sets

o Cloud services are perceived as insecure

o Open source is mistrusted

o Governance is too restrictive

o Prototypes are underappreciated.

Curran makes some excellent points, but there are someexplanations needed for each of his five reasons. IT may have thewrong skill sets, but many IT departments, particularly ininsurance, are also dealing with legacy systems. The Web isconsidered innovative for some of these older systems.

To me, the next three reasons all fall under the sameumbrella: risk management/corporate governance. Whether the cloudor open source are secure or not is irrelevant once someone bringsup the issue to the executive committee. Corporate governance isdesigned to fight innovation and it's often doing a good job ofit.

As for prototypes, in a Virtual Viewpoint on theTech-Decisions.com Web site, Cindy Saccocia, the director ofinsurance industry solutions for Microsoft, wrote: “Many of ourinsurance customers view [cloud computing] as a way to shift theirIT R&D to critical business initiatives and applications byletting commodity-based services such as e-mail, migrate to thecloud.”

There's no doubt, though, that many insurers rely on thesoftware community to find new and better ways for carriers tooperate. The problem software vendors face, though, is if theirsolutions are viewed as too extreme they are going to havedifficulty selling them.

In our IT Town Hall article this month (“Gotta WearShades,” p. 14), Great American Insurance CIO Piyush Singh put theblame squarely on the software industry. “There is not enoughventure capital being invested that will lead to innovationconcepts materializing into solutions for the industry,” he says.“There also does not seem to be an appetite among the largerplayers in the software-vendor industry to invest dollars and betransformational in the insurance industry.”

While I was researching Curran's blog post, Novaricasent out a news release on so-called “cool” technology initiativesthey have come across in insurance and they plan on reporting onsome of these initiatives each quarter. Novarica director MattJosefowicz lists five in his first report. Hopefully he'll keepfinding more, but it could be a tall order.