There are worse things in life to be called than practical. So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that insurance professionals chose that word to best describe their relationship with technology. The only surprise is that the word “conservative” didn't end up a little higher in the survey.

IVANS, the membership cooperative that helps insurers increase sales and improve customer service through technology, released its Technology Lifecycle Survey in September. It asked insurers to describe their company's approach to adopting new technology. Almost 78 percent of the respondents chose the word “practical” while 16 percent opted for “conservative.” In this context, practical means to use technology to fill a business need for the company, while conservative means that technology needs to be proven to work in other companies before their company adopts.

Perhaps surprising was the six percent who used the word “aggressive” to describe their approach. In this study, aggressive means willing to try any type of technology to give the company a competitive edge.

In summarizing the study, IVANS pointed to the small number of carriers selling policies over the Internet as an example of the industry's practicality. The industry relies on independent agents because the system still works-it's practical. There's a lot of work to be done on the IT side of the business, but figuring out a way to effectively sell policies online isn't one of them.

What is practical is updating legacy systems to make them Web based; more than half of the respondents felt this was the direction to head. According to IVANS, one of the motivating factors behind carriers that Web-enable their legacy systems is making their Web site more useful to the agents. “Allowing dedicated agents to enter a Web site to obtain a quote, check the status of a claim, or update a policy is clearly the strategy insurance companies are taking in terms of technological advancements,” according to IVANS.

Becoming Web-based is about the only sure thing in insurance technology today. With 53 percent of the respondents implementing solutions and another 30 percent in the process of re-writing systems to be Web based, the industry has found the answer to the question: What can the Internet do for my business?

“By upgrading legacy systems to work over the Internet, carriers are gaining increased efficiencies by eliminating the need to maintain numerous leased lines along with reducing the time for an agent to receive accurate information,” according to IVANS.

It's hard to get a company away from a tried and true method of operating. Making that method work better just makes it more, well, practical.

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