A Maasai warrior with a spear in one hand and a smartphone in the other.

That's the visual shorthand that futurist Daniel Burrus uses when describing how rapidly the world is adopting cloud and mobile technology.

I heard Burrus speak last week at the annual NetVU conference of Vertafore users. As someone who has been following the insurance industry's tech evolution for decades, Burrus believes that colorful image–of the ancient juxtaposed with the bleeding edge– personifies how technology is changing our world.

Burrus is known for accurately predicting technology trends. In 1985, based on a projection of what he was already seeing in the tech world, he prognosticated networking, dematerialization (making things smaller), virtualization, product intelligence, interactivity, mobility, convergence and globalization.

Now he's saying that the insurance industry is on the threshold of a technological—and cultural—revolution that would have been impossible only a few years ago. He calls it an “inflection point,” the perfect convergence where cloud and mobile technology are coming together at the right price point and capability to transform the way we do business.

The only thing standing in our way is our mindset: “Legacy systems aren't the problem; legacy thinking is.”

In the old business model, the company CEO developed strategy, then handed the plan down to IT for implementation. The new business model is for the IT people, who understand what's possible with technology, are doing the strategizing, he said.

Technology allows independent agents and brokers to do what they do best: cultivate relationships with clients and take it to an unprecedented personalized level, in a way that will render the long-standing competition with direct writers obsolete, Burrus said.

“We weren't ready 5 years ago,” he said, “but now we're ready to do something profound in this seemingly stodgy industry.”

For customers, technology gives new meaning to the old “have it your way” fast-food mantra. It's less about “customization” and more about “personalization,” Burris said, because while relationships are important, they can happen in many ways. For example, people who'd rather read a book than listen to one are more likely to prefer email to voice mail, so you should communicate with them that way. “It doesn't matter what you're comfortable with, it's what the customer wants that's important,” Burrus said.

Technology also makes it possible to have a high-definition, digital relationship with people you'll never meet in person. Since many people are already using Skype, it's another way producers could be communicating with their customers—especially since it's free and can be done on mobile devices as well as in the office.

And in the very near future, there will be more, and cheaper, ways to communicate. Interactive and 3D TV is around the corner, smart phones are getting smarter, and microchips are coming that can project an image from the smart phone to the wall.

With 3D capabilities, agency websites can be as interactive as a video game, and will revolutionize risk evaluation with the ability to move through a building to be insured to determine exactly how it's laid out, Burrus said.

And speaking of video games: The upcoming generation of insurance employees—kids now still in grammar school—are learning a lot more than just how to kill zombies. The Xbox 360 experience is “fully immersive, better than any PC for simulations,” Burrus said. Gamers spend hours studying how to use virtual tools, collaborate with virtual, international teams, converse via global video conferencing—and then head off to a 20^th century school or workplace that's like taking a time machine backward, Burrus said.

These young people will bring invaluable skills to the insurance world, but that world must adapt to accommodate them. Unfortunately, there's now a war in the workplace between young and old, a war that must end with collaboration before we can move forward, Burrus said.

Your future success hinges on being something of a prognosticator yourself. Successfully anticipating trends means knowing how to differentiate between “soft” and “hard” trends, Burrus said. Soft trends are things that might happen given what's happening now; hard trends are things that will happen for sure.

For example, 10 years after Elvis Presley died, the number of Elvis impersonators was growing exponentially. If a futurist would have made a prediction based on this “soft” trend, today 1 in 3 Americans would be Elvis impersonators, Burrus said. Polaroid and Kodak treated the growth of digital like a soft trend—a move that has rendered them all but obsolete. And the U.S. trillion-dollar budget surplus in the 1990s was treated like a hard trend, which is part of our economic problem today.

“Economists look at cycles all the time, which is why they're usually wrong,” Burrus said. “Real change happens linearally, not cyclically. Once the Chinese park their bikes and get cars, they're not going back.”

The potential for insurance growth in China and other developing countries is a hard trend—and a huge opportunity. Insurers will need to establish agencies and sales teams to serve this huge, emerging market, both on site and virtually.

Another hard trend you can (and should) take to the bank is the aging global baby boomer generation, which controls most of the U.S. wealth—a fact that, if recognized and served, could generate new businesses and jumpstart the economy, he said.

Burrus predicts that in 5 years, the insurance industry will experience a transformation in selling, marketing, communicating, collaborating, educating and innovating—“then add mobile to this,” he said. “Transform and use tech-driven transformation to your advantage.”

Special Reports /

Lose the &quot;Legacy Thinking&quot;

Related Stories

Recommended For You

Lose the "Legacy Thinking"