Collaboration is the watchword of insurance leaders today—because it's increasingly viewed as key to growth, innovation, operational efficiency, customer intimacy, and other strategic goals. Senior insurance executives are starting to discover opportunities all around to collaborate—with consumers and business customers, with their supply chain of agents and brokers, with their suppliers of information technology and business process services, and within their own organizations' ranks.

Collaborative relationships with other companies have been a key enabler of Homesite's strategy of rapid growth—by adding value and creating efficiencies that complement the company's core competencies.

"We made a decision early on that outsourcing and partnering would be a fundamental part of our growth," explained Peter Settel, chief information officer at Homesite Insurance, during a PropertyCasualty360 roundtable discussion held this summer in Cambridge, Mass. "We look to partner with companies that can integrate with us and create some technology advantage that goes beyond what we have. Scale, efficiency, automation, that creates some value for us. Not just checking boxes and doing due diligence, our people have to be creating value and showing how that outsourcing is making things more efficient."