There's not much mystery behind an insurer's decision to undertake a data warehouse project. “We had this general desire to create a data warehouse so our senior managers would have better access to data, be able to look at key business indicators, and drill down into the data,” says Phil Marzullo, CIO of Folksamerica Reinsurance. “But the requirement that finally gave us the momentum to do it was a real need to build a loss-reserving system and replace the complex Excel spreadsheet reserving system we were using.”

Marzullo felt with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations taking full effect in 2005, the company needed to put a loss-reserving system together that got it away from Excel spreadsheets. “We had an old legacy system–a typical story with most insurance companies,” he says. Marzullo doesn't believe there are a lot of general accounting systems that keep track of policies, premiums, and claims in the reinsurance world. Folksamerica's legacy system didn't have the database that would enable business users to extract data easily or put data in the hands of specific users.

In 2005, after making the decision to build a data warehouse, Folksamerica looked at several business intelligence vendors, and during the evaluation process, the company learned one vendor, Information Builders, had an existing data model in place. “I thought at the time this might be an advantage for Information Builders in that if it already had an insurance data model built, we could use that as a starting point and maybe get our DW built in a shorter period of time,” says Marzullo. The IT staff at Folksamerica is made up of about 30 people, he notes. “We do most of the work in-house,” he says.