Faced with a host of challenges and pressures, insurers have been driven to look for new ways to improve results in areas such as reducing claims leakage, improving underwriting performance, and generally reducing costs. Pressures include an economy that, while certainly in recovery mode, has been slower and weaker than hoped. Add to that investment income that is unlikely to ever mimic the strong, steady, sustained growth of the equities market in the mid-90s and early 2000s; premiums that are unlikely to fully recover anytime soon (thanks to lots of capacity and fewer exposures in the P/C market and decreased demand for certain life and annuity products); increasing competition for profitable niches; cost savings pressures, and the economic climate is not ideal.

Thanks to this less-than-ideal environment, many carriers have included as part of their strategies three key business goals. These goals include maintaining or improving their market position (sales/cross-sell/up-sell), retention (renewal), and efficiency.

Other emerging technology trends from outside the industry have a profound effect on carrier's IT strategies as well. Consumer expectations of companies' Web site capabilities, mobile apps, call centers, etc. are shaped not by competing insurers but rather by other industries, including banks, airlines, and investment firms. The efforts by other industries to make information more accessible to customers—while insurers have struggled to do the same with legacy systems—have resulted in increasingly obvious shortcomings for both consumers and agents. Since agents and consumers (and even employees) are consumers in their everyday lives, they have growing expectations of technology and the benefits that rapid advances in technology have introduced into other parts of their lives.