When I first started in the insurance business as an underwriter–which doesn't seem all too long ago in my mind–collaboration required assembling teams of people in a conference room, passing memos and documents through intraoffice and regular mail, and making phone calls. Networking meant glad-handing with colleagues and contacts at seminars and social functions. Real-time processing meant dealing with the paper files that were piled on my desk in front of the CRT, which I avoided using if at all possible.

Since then, real-time collaboration and networking technology have transformed the way we live our lives and the way we do business. People may complain about the “always connected” world, but technology feeds our need to be social and linked to people across the room or around the globe. Today's collaboration solutions also offer easy-to-use interfaces in ever more powerful computing devices.

It is against this backdrop that insurers, dragging along a legacy of technology, must operate. The challenge for carriers remains how best to incorporate modern and emerging technology in ways that make it easy for employees and agents to collaborate and do business.