Many carriers are worried about the amount of data that isentering their systems on a daily basis. While some worry moreabout unstructured data—video, texts, email and such—at least oneindustry observer feels it is more important for carriers to dealwith the data quality issues around their structured data.

"It's not uncommon for us to go to insurance companies and theycannot tell a person's first name from last name," says SamirAhmed, senior architect, X by 2. "They have a name field thatsomeone typed in first name, last name or last name, first name. Itmay be a mainframe system with two name fields."

Ahmed realizes such situations sound comical, but he insists itis a situation that is both real and pervasive within the insuranceindustry.

"In our experience as a service provider to insurance companies,[carriers] are not worried yet about how to make sense ofunstructured data. The truth of the matter is insurers have biggerfish to fry, so to speak."

The ability to move content throughout the enterprise usuallybegins with the preparation done beforehand, explains WilliamMontefusco, business systems delivery manager for AmeriLife.

"If you are working for a company that has a [content]management strategy, the way they house data is handled needs to beconducted in a way the business users can work with," saysMontefusco. "When there is no strategy or things come from thebottom up, there tends to be a lot of variety. In such cases youhave problems because you have to adapt to a lot of forms. It alsodepends on whether a customer has invested in forming some form ofarchitecture in respect to how the data is housed."

Ahmed sees some carriers looking to modernize their policysystems in order to enforce some of their internal conventions andrules. This includes steps such as putting controls up front wherecustomer information is routed through a CRM system rather thankeying in the data directly into the policy system. Anothertechnique involves putting data cleansing into place after thefact.

"Once the data is recorded, you do an extract of it and run itthrough tools that can parse out and try to make sense of thedata," he says.

Carriers then can perform a statistical analysis on the datathey have.

"Say they have 80 percent confidence that the name is correctthe way it is recorded," says Ahmed. "When the tool says it is 80percent confident that might be good enough. There are also toolsthat say they are 80 percent confident that it is incorrect andthat kicks out the name for someone to review and fixmanually."

Ahmed believes the starting point on their confidence in thedata's accuracy actually is fairly high.

"You could say you would only accept a positive result if thetool gives back a confidence level of 95 percent," he says. "Thatcreates two standard deviations of confidence. You start [at 95percent], but that means the number of exceptions is going to behigh because you are rejecting things that actually are correct.Then you start looking at training the tools, improving theprocesses, and then you start ratcheting it down, slowly butsurely. We've seen cases where insurers are running into fewerproblems because of these tools."

SOCIAL MEDIA

The social media content integration that Ahmed sees amonginsurers is purely at the Web content level.

"We haven't seen it at the full enterprise content scale,primarily because enterprise content includes things like internaldocuments, manuals, reports, and workflow cycles for how to createthem," says Ahmed. "Social media doesn't really play a role in anyof that."

What Ahmed has seen is carriers interacting with their customersso they can tailor their content to known customers more than tothe anonymous public browser.

"We've seen [social media] definitely complicate things becausea lot of the traditional content management systems don't havesocial media capabilities. [Carriers] have to look at how tointegrate that content. Do they upgrade to newer versions that nowinclude social media modules?"

Celent senior analyst Mike Fitzgerald believes insurers need tobe careful in dealing with the information spread through socialmedia.

"That's just starting to evolve," he says. "A company should notturn [positive comments] into an advertisement. That can turn onyou very quickly."

The best strategy that Fitzgerald has seen with consumer-basedproducts is to identify influential people who are currentcustomers and have had positive interactions with your company.

"Offer them some additional assistance and make sure they knowwhat is going on and see if you can add them to a special networkand then see where that goes," he says. "You want to cultivate[influential customers], but not so it looks unseemly. You need tosee who is influential as a satisfied customer."

Carriers also need to identify when positive information isposted and to leverage that content in a way to gain somevisibility, according to Fitzgerald. That includes determining howsocial media data can be used to help risk selection and benefitpeople who may display positive risk characteristics, whichtraditional underwriting hasn't discovered.

"On the life side—which appears to be extremely active—there arecompanies doing innovative things around risk control that theunderwriter wasn't aware of," says Fitzgerald. "The ability to usethat information for better underwriting is still to come, but theinformation is out there. It's a question of whether companies wantto access that and how quickly they can monitor it and eventuallytake advantage of it."

Another area that makes the picture more complex is content oncarrier Websites, which is increasingly moving in the direction ofbeing user generated.

"People are providing reviews and comments and that isincorporated in the actual write-up," says Ahmed. "For instance, ifa carrier has a page about what type of homeowners' products theyare offering, they may want to link it with some basic homeinformation and provide tips from other customers. These are typesof things that customers are initiating and they get added to thewrite-ups. At some point, people like these tips enough that theyare incorporated in the main article."

Ahmed believes insurers generally are taking it slow when itcomes to integrating social media content.

"There are not many doing a full integrationof user-generated content into their main articles," he says. "Whatis more common is the ability to comment on articles, to "like"something, and tweet a link to something. We've seen a few that didgo that route and look at positive customer reaction andincorporate that content."

Where that impacts workflow for carriers is they have toincorporate the monitoring of comments and tweets in their workflowand then they have to extract the content from the comments,incorporate it into the main article, and publish it. There's timeand effort going toward that."

Ahmed doesn't feel those not integrating user-generated contentare seeing an impact in their content workflow.

"What they have generally done is create rules for social mediamarketing," says Ahmed. "They use different terms for the positionand they rely on the typical social media tools rather than contentmanagement tools to monitor what people are saying andwriting."

From a p&c perspective, social media has become usefulbecause in managing content, according to Montefusco.

"Something as simple as Google Earth can give you a feel forwhat's going on," he says.

Still, Montefusco believes integrating social media into contentmanagement is not being done at many insurance companies.

"We utilize social media in an industry perspective, but wehaven't set up anything that integrates it," he says. "If we smellsomething fishy or it seems odd, we'll use that as a means ofinvestigation, but we haven't made it a standard yet as acatch-all. We've created relationships with third-party companiesthat run credit reports or do background checks. We provide theminformation, grab the results, and pull it into our environment.With respect to Facebook or Twitter, I'm not sure how we would dosomething like that yet."

It is particularly important to monitor social media content forinsurers operating in the highly-regulated lines that involve somesort of regulated securities products, points out Fitzgerald.

"Any of the comments made around a product are consideredadvertisement and fall under the same auspices as otheradvertisement and has to be made by a person licensed by FINRA," hesays. "Those rules impact the content and what actually goes out.The difficult thing for insurers is to make sure either independentbrokers or captive brokers are aware of the regulation and don'tmake a product endorsement unless it is controlled by the samerules of standard advertising. It's a content issue as well as amanagement issue and being able to manage what goes out, even ifit's not under their direct control."

The monitoring of social media content already is being used inclaims on the p&c side as a standard practice forinvestigations.

"Claims adjusters say [a social media site] is the first placethey go when an SIU gets a file," says Fitzgerald. "The officerwill go to Facebook and Twitter and look for the same or generalnames in the right geographical area."

The problems claims people face is the search technology isn'tas strong as investigators would like.

"It's almost all manual searches," says Fitzgerald. "It's provenits value and admissibility in court tests. Courts look at this asdiscoverable evidence if it is treated appropriately. Do you try tomechanize it and improve its usefulness and efficiency in which thedata is brought in? That's still under development."

NOT JUST PAPER

Kay Haupert is applications director in IT for Sentry Insuranceand one of her responsibilities involves working with the carrier'selectronic publishing group. She helps build all the publishingsystems and form templates.

"They are responsible for getting data and templates merged anddistributed to customers through a variety of channels," shesays.

Haupert also works in the operations area where Sentry has twoprint-to-mail sites, which conduct the heavy printing andinserting.

"What I provide is more from a publishing perspective on contentmanagement," she says.

Sentry is focusing on going paperless so the content that isreceived in various formats—unstructured objects—can be stored inthe carrier's archives.

"Some of our business areas are trying to go paperless so theobjects can be stored and retrieved without having to manage paperfiles from desk-to-desk," she says. "The claims area was one of thefirst onboard with the paperless environment. Even if there isprinted material, we are scanning it and putting it in an archiveso [business users] can retrieve it without touching any paper.There certainly is a push for that, but I see a lot of areas thatstill use paper and have to manage a lot of content."

Publishing for Sentry means creating documents—although Haupertpoints out that doesn't necessarily mean printing on paper.

"They become an object that can be distributed in some fashion,"she says. "When we say publishing we are getting a piece of data ora request for a transaction from one of our businessapplications."

That might be a single transaction or the department might sendthe publishing group something in batch, explains Haupert.

"With a single transaction we would get a request from abusiness system and in that request it would give us enoughinformation that we know what type of form to publish in thatpackage and they provide all the data," she says. "Our job is totake that data, marry it with forms, and based on what the usersask for, the publishing group distributes the content.

That means a variety of options—email, fax, print it, a PDF orjust store it in the archives.

"Once we get the request, where it goes and when we replydepends on what the business unit requests," says Haupert.

The Oracle system Sentry uses is Documaker, which is Sentry'spublishing engine. The carrier builds templates with the softwareand then uses the publishing engine to build and publish thetemplate.

"[Oracle] has provided some other pieces around [Documaker] thatallow us to accept the transactions, process them, and publish themusing Documaker and post-processing—the actual distribution of thecontent," says Haupert.

Sentry has had several software packages for the publishingprocess—one for batch print, and another that did userinteraction.

"What we are able to expand on now is to gobeyond batch," says Haupert. "For our point of sale documents, wecan actually create the documents and return a PDF immediatelyrather than waiting for a batch process," says Haupert. "There wereways to do that before, but it was convoluted. This has opened thatavenue as well as other distribution. With Documaker we are able topublish quickly and when they want it distributed. They can tell usin the transaction and we can react to it. Before it was either youget batch or real time, but you can't tell us at the transactiontime what you want."

LEGACY SYSTEMS

Montefusco has worked for multiple insurance carriers and thushas worked with three different content management solutions in hiscareer.

AmeriLife uses the ImageNow solution from Perceptive Softwareand has seen an increase in work productivity among the businessusers with the product. 

"It typically took 40 minutes to process an application throughits life cycle, but we've been able to cut that to 32 minutes,"says Montefusco. "That's a significant savings. We use that savingsto support attrition and we can grow our business withoutincreasing staff."

Flexibility is a key for any content management system,according to Montefusco, particularly for carriers operating underthe burden of legacy mainframes.

"The majority of our legacy systems are post-application," hesays. "In the insurance industry there is a lot of green screen. Weuse ImageNow with accounting and other areas. In our environment,we use ImageNow with CRM, Excel, some Web applications, and aproprietary application. It's extremely adaptable and can handleworking with a multitude of systems. Some companies have moreprogramming involved, but most can support multiple legacysystems."

Ahmed doesn't see a carrier's legacy system being an impedimentto the quality of content for carriers, at least on the outwardfacing side. With inward facing content, it is a bit of anissue.

One element of ECM that is different from Web content involvesdocuments that are relevant to the customer—something they can seeon the portal.

"Not all systems have the ability to provide a Web consumabledocument," says Ahmed. "There are systems that produce printscreens that a printer can understand and you have to putconversions on top of that to convert the print screen into a PDFfile and then find a new repository for the documents to make themavailable for customers and agents. In that sense the legacy systemis definitely impeding that aspect, but in the Web content aspect,there's not as much dependency on other backendsystems."