For Karen Pauli, research director in the insurance practice for TowerGroup, the first step in a business intelligence project calls for getting your data in order, but there are other steps that need to follow for carriers to achieve success with their BI initiatives.

Long Implementation

The initial delay in adopting a business intelligence solution can be traced to long project delays, according to Pauli.

“These things seemed to go on for years and years,” she says.

But technology providers realized if they couldn’t help the process along and help the carriers chunk it up into smaller consumable segments, potential BI implementations were going to go down the tubes.

“The business side doesn’t have an appetite any longer for an 18-month or a two-year implementation,” says Pauli. “If [the business side] is part of the initial process and has some stated goals, that is when you can chunk up the deliverables.”

Holding Things Up

Business intelligence was one of the technology areas TowerGroup saw as having the most traction in 2010. Carriers have slowly learned that the initial hang-up—thinking they hade to have their data in perfect order before they start—is not necessarily true today.

“There’s no such thing as perfect order for data,” says Pauli. “Once [insurers] understand that not all data elements actually turn into information you can look at pulling out some of the data elements in the first initiative, get the data warehouse loaded with the important data elements that lead to decisioning, let the BI technology bring it all together and turn it into information, and then route it into the BPM software, that’s when you start getting good results. Most of the carriers who have gotten away from BI for the sake of BI are the ones who can move forward.”

Quick Results

Once insurers get their data in shape and you get the BI solution functioning through BPM and the dashboards that come along with it, being able to make actual fact-based decisions can happen pretty quickly, according to Pauli.

Special Reports /

Achieving Success with Business Intelligence Initiatives

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