Technology is constantly evolving and innovations are madeevery day. The latest information on the tools available—in agencymanagement systems; data storage, backup and recovery technologies;and mobile device management software—helps your agency enjoy thebest that today's technology landscape has to offer.

What can technology really do for your agency? Jeff Yates, ACTexecutive director at the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokersof America, said his team recently reviewed best practices studiesto evaluate the effect of enhanced agency productivity. “Therevenue per employee back in 1993 was $83,000 in a best practicesagency. It's now $183,000,” primarily due to advances intechnology, he said.

Agency management systems

New innovations in agency management system technology have beenso profound that producers may not consider how far they've come.“I don't think we step back and realize what has been accomplishedin the past few years, as far as adoption and driving efficienciesinto the marketplace,” said Bruce Winterburn, vice president ofindustry relations at Bothell, Wa.'s Vertafore. With the timesavings and workflow improvements supported by today's managementsystems, agencies of every size have embraced them. 

Read the sidebar “Back it Up and Bring itBack.”

“Another big thing I think is making a difference—it's part ofthe real time process and it's threaded back into the differentmanagement systems, including ours—is the inclusion of instantlyavailable real-time information,” he said. With some usage data nowavailable, efficiency improvements are measurable within agencies.Winterburn cites time studies that show estimated average savingsof roughly 3 minutes with real-time transactions.

The most efficient agency management systemsare “organized to be workflow driven, so it's easier for the userto get their tasks done as quickly as possible and better servicetheir clients,” said Reid French, CEO of University Park,Ill.-based Applied Systems Inc. Agents can run their entireoperations, including billing, creating producer commission reportsand helping CSRs support the renewal process. French said agenciesuse management systems to protect themselves from E&Oexposures, and that transaction time stamping offers a detailedrecord should anything unfortunate happen. After tremendous growthin the user base over the past several years, French said, “we'rereally pleased to see where it will go over the next 10 to 15years.” 

Related: Read the article “What's Driving the Risein Data Breaches?” by Rick Kam, CIPP and Jeremy Henley,CHPC.

Christopher Cook, owner of Alliance Insurance Services LLC inWinston-Salem, N.C., uses a Jenesis agency management system, avendor with a heavy footprint in the region. It's a core resourcefor Cook's team, which writes about $4 million in premiumsannually, and he saw the need to maximize productivity from thebeginning. 

“When I adopted an agency management system, we were a verysmall agency, but we knew we couldn't grow without thattechnology,” he said. Seizing every productivity enhancement, fromreal-time technology to interface systems that pull in underwritingdata, has been critical to Alliance's success. “Especially as anindependent agency, there's no way to store all of that dataefficiently without an agency management system,” Cook said.

Read the sidebar “Handheld Accessibility.”

A suite of Vertafore products helps the Dean and DraperInsurance Agency track workflows. The systems have been a greataddition, said Kyle Dean, vice president of the Houston-basedagency, “because we can run reports, we can see how work is flowingthrough the office, and we can move work to different desks.” Theagency has five locations in Texas, and writes about $120 millionin premiums annually between its P&C and benefitsbusinesses. 

Pointing to the continuity provided by the systems his agencyuses, Dean said, “Everybody's on the same page. We all know whatwe're doing, and we know what work is on which desk.” His employeesalso find it simple to transfer work between desks when an employeeis out of the office.

Data storage

Each Dean and Draper office logs onto the main servers inHouston, giving the team increased continuity. To ensure that itsdata is both available and protected, the agency uses both onsiteand offsite storage solutions, said George A. Douty II, theagency's information technology manager. “Some of our data isoriginated onsite, but then backed up and replicated to offsitelocations. Other data is both originated and stored offsite,” hesaid. The various offices underwent a host of technology upgrades,including computers and Internet speed, to bring everyone currentand to make data access and transfer more robust.

Few agencies today store data onsite on asingle storage platform. “The market is trending toward, and needs,both a combination of onsite and offsite storage as part of a dataprotection and disaster recovery solution,” said Brian Findlay,director of global storage at Imation in Oakdale, Minn., a companythat specializes in scalable storage and data security solutions.Cloud storage is a great “pay-as-you-go storage medium,” he said,and it doesn't require large investments in infrastructure.However, one common misconception Findlay corrects is that cloudstorage is entirely replacing onsite storage arrays. “People aren'tgoing to be going just directly to cloud. You need to have thatonsite storage for fast recovery.”

Related: Read the article “This is Your Brain on Tech” by LauraMazzuca Toops.

Producers are all too familiar with the devastation of disaster,and if those calamities affect your own agency, your backed-up datawill be a lifeline for your business. Unfortunately, it's afunction that isn't valued highly enough by many small businesses,Findlay said. “As far as having a managed disaster recoverystrategy, SMBs [small and medium businesses] are way underpenetrated right now.” Compliance mandates are making itincreasingly necessary for agencies to develop solid businesscontinuity plans, but the good news is that many solutions aresimple and relatively inexpensive. Tried and true, removable diskscontinue to be a fast and effective way to get your data back inaction, according to Findlay. “A small business owner could justthrow it in their briefcase or bring it home.”

Recovering data from offsite storage or the cloud is anincreasingly popular option, and one that takes location out of theequation. Dean and Draper uses restore processes within theirbackup software, allowing greater flexibility to recover data intiers according to their needs and available resources. “Because 90percent of our servers are virtual, we can restore multiple levelsvia this software,” Douty said. The time to restore data fromeither an offsite storage location or a cloud-based platform can beimpacted by the amount of infrastructure an agency has available,and is one factor to consider when developing a backup and recoveryplan. “The only drawback is that it requires a lot of bandwidth tocomplete the offsite replications,” Douty cautioned.

Mobile

Insurance is a highly competitive industry, and an agency'sability to keep producers efficient and productive directly affectsthe bottom line. Cook estimated that nearly three-quarters of hisagency's customers have either a smartphone or a tablet, andthey're increasingly becoming a main mode of communication—a trendthat transcends age group. “I have customers in their 60s and 70swho don't pick up the phone anymore,” Cook said. “If I want tocommunicate with them, I have to send them an email.” Hisproducers, too, rely heavily on mobile devices to communicate with customers and other agents, navigate toappointments or property inspections and take photographs forunderwriters. “Information is constantly flowing at and through our[handhelds],” Cook said, adding that customers now ask questionsvia text message. “That's something I didn't think would everhappen just as short as 8 years ago when I started thisagency.”

Managing a flurry of company-issued andpersonally owned handheld devices has become easier with theproliferation of mobile device management (MDM) platforms. “Thebetter solutions can accommodate hybrid environments, both from acorporate-liable and from an individual-liable policy managementperspective,” said Troy Fulton, director of product marketing atMDM provider Tangoe in Orange, Conn. With mixed environmentscommon, agencies no longer need to worry how they'll support eachproducer's device of choice because today's solutions “provide theflexibility with respect to department, location and employee” toensure each device is managed properly, Fulton said. Robust MDMplatforms can push IT policies to nearly any device, bringingauthorized access to email, data storage and even applicationsunder agency control. 

Agency management system vendors, too, are looking at the mobiledevice landscape as a call to action. Tablet support is being addedto some of Vertafore's products, according to Winterburn, and ateam is working now to develop a workable, intuitive userinterface. “There's getting to be a standard look and feel oftechnology—an almost instant type of recognition of what's going onon the screen,” he said. Developers are busy making the systems' UI“more familiar and simple,” which Winterburn said is necessary totruly take advantage of evolving technologies such as tablets. It'sall about “creating more of an intuitive approach to navigation ingeneral,” he said.

Related: See the slideshow “Top 12 Countries forCloud Computing” by Laura Mazucca Toops.

Making their systems more mobile-friendly also is an initiativeat Applied Systems. Some of their newer products “can be accessedthrough the Internet and so can be used on mobile devices, which issomething that newer agents have certainly come to expect,” Frenchsaid. It's a fundamental shift that he sees driving the marketplacein the years to come. “Mobile is going to play a huge role in thisindustry, because the producers, the people out there actuallytalking with their customer base, are highly mobile individuals.”He said that an independent agent's opportunity to move into therole of a trusted advisor is likely to depend heavily on theirability to keep pace with clients while still maintaining efficientworkflows within the office.

Innovations on the horizon

Today you can more easily gather, store, track and access yourdata. But how can you make it more meaningful and, ultimately,profitable? Along with greater data availability, Yates said thequestion becomes, “How do you get good business intelligence bothout of your agency management system and third-party sources?” Hepointed to emerging data mining technologies that might helpproducers determine when a customer encountered a life event, whichcould then prompt a proactive contact to discuss their newinsurance needs.

And of course, the industry continues to make strides toward theworkflow improvements available with real-time technology. Yatesbelieves that involvement from all parties will be necessary to getwhere agents want to go. “We need consistency across the carriersto be providing real time,” he said, which will include smallercarriers coming on board with real-time and other carriers offeringreal-time functions, “so the agency employee knows that real-timeis available.” Those efforts are currently going on industry-wide,which Yates said will “continue to enhance real-time transactionsto make them faster.”

Julie Knudson is a freelance business writerbased in Seattle.