Buzzwords in the technology field sometimes take on different meanings. Business process management (BPM) is one such term the insurance industry has focused on in recent years. For some, it is a set of tools; for others, it is a methodology. However you plan to deal with BPM, though, you need to understand it is not business as usual.

Art Barrios, managing director, PricewaterhouseCoopers, contends the primary benefit of BPM–and its biggest challenge–is it requires carriers to look at their business from a horizontal perspective and to stop looking vertically within specific system silos. This is a major change for insurers. “They've invested tens of millions of dollars over decades in their systems, and now comes a significant paradigm shift where you tell them, 'Let's not worry about how we are going to fix a particular business problem by looking at a system, enhancing it, or replacing it,'” says Barrios. “'Instead, let's look at the process–where it begins, who touches it, what systems are dependent on the process.'”

Traditional applications don't provide necessary feedback to the business process owners, explains Peter Kastner, vice president and research director of technology integration for the Aberdeen Group. Where there is emphasis on customer service, people are moving toward the business process monitoring capabilities of BPM packages because the process owners are demanding more visibility–almost on a real-time basis–into their critical business processes. “[Process owners] want to know what is going on,” he says. “How many claims are being tracked? In whose Inbox are they sitting? What are the risks as of the moment? Is compliance being met?”