Hard work often brings rewards, and those insurance carriers implementing business intelligence (BI) projects are finding they're in a good position to affirm this statement. Business intelligence isn't easy because of the sheer amount of data carriers have collected over time and because that data never has been placed in a single repository. Claims data has had its own silo as did marketing data and customer service data. Integrating that information has been a challenge. The benefits, though, make the work worthwhile. Both decision makers and business users can leverage their company's data to make more intelligent business decisions.

United Heritage Life (UHL) discovered early on in its BI project there were problems with its data. The carrier needed to improve the integrity of its data as well as enable business users to work with the data by adding codes that could be extracted from the data warehouse. “Once we went through that first project, we understood what it was going to take to have the right data and the integrity we needed within the cube,” says Mick Ware, vice president of IT. From that point on, whenever the carrier made system changes or anticipated building new cubes, UHL made sure the data was cleansed and had the appropriate information in it.

“Getting data in line is part of why you don't roll out a new cube each week,” indicates Ware. “It takes some design work upfront on the cube and then back to your data to make sure [the data] has the integrity you need.”