The insurance industry was an early adopter of information technology, and computer systems are still the backbone of core insurance processes. However, in many organizations, technology is no longer an enabler of business process improvement; it has become a constraint that insurance professionals grapple with every day.

The limitations of existing technology are clearly evident in today's claims organizations. In the last decade, visionary claims leaders have conceived of many new claim-handling processes that promise to lower costs while improving outcomes and customer service. Just a few of these new ideas include:

• Beginning the adjusting process during the first contact, including referrals across a network of partners to deliver service faster;
• Sophisticated segmentation and assignment models that deliver work immediately to the appropriate resources;
• Real-time collaboration among a team of professionals both inside and outside the claim organization, including adjusters, attorneys, investigators, case managers, and others.

However, instead of making these ideas a reality, most claims systems serve instead as an impediment to change. Too often, legacy mainframe and client/server systems cannot be modified to support new processes at a reasonable cost. At the same time, adjusters struggle with a plethora of everyday annoyances and obstacles, such as:

• The need to constantly switch between multiple screens or multiple systems to access even routine information;
• The inability for more than one person at a time to work on (or even look at) the same claim;
• The failure to capture required data elements — generally those ignored by the system's original developers.

Guidewire Software is dedicated to enabling innovation in the insurance industry and unlocking the power of technology to improve core insurance processes. Guidewire's flagship solution, Guidewire ClaimCenter, applies this basic principle to claims organizations.

ClaimCenter is entirely built with state-of-the-art software technology; it is written in Java to the J2EE standard, with a pure web client and web services interfaces. More importantly, the system provides claims leaders the freedom to translate innovative ideas into reality. This freedom allows them to tune their claim processes to the specific and evolving needs of their business, rather than struggling with the artificial limitations imposed by legacy systems.