For Karen Pauli, research director in the insurance practice forTowerGroup, the first step in a business intelligence project callsfor getting your data in order, but there are other steps that needto follow for carriers to achieve success with their BIinitiatives.

Long Implementation

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

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

But technology providers realized if they couldn’t help theprocess along and help the carriers chunk it up into smallerconsumable segments, potential BI implementations were going to godown the tubes.

“The business side doesn’t have an appetite any longer for an18-month or a two-year implementation,” says Pauli. “If [thebusiness side] is part of the initial process and has some statedgoals, that is when you can chunk up the deliverables.”

Holding Things Up

Business intelligence was one of the technology areas TowerGroupsaw as having the most traction in 2010. Carriers have slowlylearned that the initial hang-up—thinking they hade to have theirdata in perfect order before they start—is not necessarily truetoday.

“There’s no such thing as perfect order for data,” says Pauli.“Once [insurers] understand that not all data elements actuallyturn into information you can look at pulling out some of the dataelements in the first initiative, get the data warehouse loadedwith the important data elements that lead to decisioning, let theBI technology bring it all together and turn it into information,and then route it into the BPM software, that’s when you startgetting good results. Most of the carriers who have gotten awayfrom 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 BIsolution functioning through BPM and the dashboards that come alongwith it, being able to make actual fact-based decisions can happenpretty quickly, according to Pauli.