Innovation Group has released the Innovation Data MasteryMaturity Model (IDMMM), a product designed to help insurersunderstand milestones and identifiers in the data mastery journeyso they are better equipped to create a roadmap and strategy thatmaximizes the business value of solutions, including InnovationGroup's Insurer Analytics.

As outlined in a corresponding whitepaper, the new IDMMM servesas the “handbook” for process improvements to control current andfuture data. According to Innovation Group, reaching the highestlevel of data mastery requires an enterprise commitment,investment, strategy and roadmap and maturation in five specificareas:

1. Strategy and governance
2. Management and people
3. Data integration
4. Data technology and tools
5. Data quality technology

Over the past 8 years, business intelligence (BI) and analyticshave been top business priorities for insurers, as evidenced by theannual growth in budget. Insurers now understand they mustundertake data quality initiatives within their own data programsto master their current “small data” challenges before big dataovertakes projects and initiatives within the company, the companysays. According to the company, the IDMMM can help insurers gainbusiness insight in the interest of increasing revenue, decreasingexpenses, improving customer relationships, and heightening ease ofdoing business for all stakeholders.

“Novarica research indicates that business intelligence anddata-related efforts are top priorities for insurers in 2014,”explains Martina Conlon, principal, insurance, for Novarica. “Manyinsurers struggle to understand the relative effectiveness andmaturity of their existing data architecture, processes and datastrategy. Having an independent conceptual framework can be auseful tool for highlighting areas of strength and areas in need ofdevelopment, as well as guiding insurers to the level of maturityneeded to deliver strategic data analytics capabilities.”

Data Mastery, as previously defined by industry analysts, is theleveraging of internal and external data to gain business insight,increase revenue, decrease expenses, or improve ease of doingbusiness, and gained importance in the insurance industry due tothe overwhelming amount of data insurers handle daily. It should benoted that data mastery is more than just the tools to produce theinsight, starting from Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) to datawarehouses/data marts, reporting and analytics, data mining, BIpresentation layer, GIS analysis, and of course, Big Data. It isthe utilization of all of these technology elements along withpeople and process to create an overall benefit to the company.

“Many insurers are overwhelmed with information,” says EuanKing, CEO North America Technology at Innovation Group. “[Moreover]without structures in place, [they] are not taking full advantageof these storehouses of knowledge. “[We] developed the IDMMM tohelp insurers gain control and prepare for increasing flows in thefuture. Our model helps insurers understand where they are todaywith respect to enterprise maturity and where they want to be inthe future. By mastering their data, insurers can gain greaterinsights and be able to make more informed, data-based businessdecisions. It will also enable them to better define their goalsand develop roadmaps so they can maximize data masteryinvestments.”

Data Mastery A 'Journey'

In the whitepaper, the company asserts that data mastery is ajourney, rather than a project or program. Data mastery will,however, be critical for insurers over the next 3 to 5 years in adata-driven competitive marketplace. The report defines five groupswith distinct characteristics, which are from lowest to highest indegree of mastery:

• Data chaos
• Data-driven silos
• Information-driven enterprise
• Knowledge-driven enterprise
• Innovative leading enterprise

“It [has] been said for years that data is the lifeblood of theindustry,” says Ben Moreland, senior business architect forInnovation Group and author of the whitepaper. “Today, more thanever, the ability to manage that flow and use it to your businessadvantage is critical. Insurers need to incorporate an enterprisedata strategy, plus governance, and the support of seniormanagement support to ensure that true data mastery is possible.Insurers need to take advantage of available data resources. It'sno longer an option, it's an imperative.”

The Innovation Data Mastery Maturity Model is now available onthe Innovation Group's website.

Insurer Analytics, a component of the market-leading Innovation Insurer suite, works hand-in-handwith Innovation Group's new IDMMM through a fully configurable,open architecture, analytics solution with train-of-thoughtanalysis, advanced visualization, on demand MI, automatedmonitoring, web dashboard, sophisticated data engineering, and over500 insurance-specific, out-of-the-box KPIs and reports. Designedand built for insurance on the Microsoft BI stack, InsurerAnalytics features an insurance data model and capabilities thateliminate the additional time and set-up costs inherent to genericanalytics solutions.

Insurer Analytics has been recognized over the last year with anarray of industry awards, including, Celent's Model Insurer and theVanguards in Insurance Practice (VIP).