Four years ago, a survey of independent agents revealed many were fed up doing business in a Tower of Babel. Forty-eight percent said proprietary carrier systems was their top interface challenge, with 29 percent citing duplicate data entry. Unfortunately, virtually nothing has changed in this department, agents say.

I wish I could report that carriers have wised up to how shortsighted and self-defeating it is to hold agents hostage by erecting automation systems that cannot be accessed in a standard format. That agents are no longer forced to waste time and money navigating a multitude of proprietary carrier Web sites when shopping risks and servicing accounts, to their clients' detriment.

But that's not the case, according to the latest "Agency Technology Survey" by the ACORD-User Groups Information Exchange (better known as AUGIE, a consortium of agency management system user groups and ACORD).

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