With more and different information being collected each secondby insurance carriers and the methods in which that content isbeing collected also changing rapidly, many insurance carriers arelooking closely at their enterprise content management (ECM)systems and the upgrades that may be needed.

Steve Callahan, practice director at the management consultingfirm Robert E. Nolan Co., points to portals, social networking,agency automation, and self-service functions as new ways carriersare employing to collect data as well as the shift away from paperto new forms of electronic data.

“This is forcing insurers to take a new look at the maturetechnologies like workflow and imaging” that carriers have beenusing for over a decade, says Callahan. “Those two areas have beenaround forever, but we are finding more companies taking a stepback into the well-proven realm of optimized workflow and arere-doing it in the context of some new technology, new processes,new sources of data, and new kinds of data. They are making animpact.”

When carriers were first introduced to content management, thetechnology had a great impact in the number of ways data was beingused. That number continues to increase and Callahan maintainscarriers are now studying how the data gets routed.

“They are revamping a good deal of the traditional technology,”he says. “There's also a geographic dispersion with remoteemployees. This is causing people to step back and mayberestructure their approach to storage and management of data. Aschanges come in the industry they are revisiting the infrastructureand looking at different solutions.”

One of the key areas to focus on is unstructured data, which tomany people means audio and video files and photographs, butCallahan points out that some text files also are unstructured andif insurers cut up the unstructured data pie, text data is thelargest portion of the pie followed by images—accident pictures,inspection pictures of a house—and then audio files, such asrecorded reports for claims investigations.

“Companies are trying figure out how to get into the data in anautomated manner,” he says. “Some text analytics tools are doingmining through actual unstructured images of data and are gettingout meaningful information.”

Callahan reports that an insurer he has worked with hasconducted text mining research on workers' comp business where theyare running tools against the claims files looking for words thatwould profile risks or exceptions. Their system also is goingthrough images stored in their imaging systems “like they wereadjustors going through a file.”

Callahan believes this is a good use of text analytics.

“They are not changing how data is stored, but they are changingthe way they are looking at it,” he says. “The industry is veryeffective with structured data. The biggest challenges withstructured data are redundancy and quality, not infrastructure ormanagement. When you look at unstructured data it becomes thevolume and indexing that makes it more challenging.”

Callahan also has seen telephone tools workwell at creating links to integrate into a carrier's administrationsystems.

“You have recorded calls on service transactions that have alink to the legacy or new admin system so you can get to the entireexperience of that client,” he says.

The extent that carriers are now dealing with unstructured datais overwhelming, points out Callahan.

“If you look at telematics on the p&c side and the flood ofdata coming in from social media, indexing is the key and that'swhere I see advances,” he says “The metadata is the key to get tothe analytics. If the analytics tools know where to look, they cangive you the answer. Knowing where to look is the challenge.”

With so much data coming in, Callahan believes storage remainsan issue, although he sees some leading-edge carriers moving in thedirection of the cloud, although most carriers are more cautiousbecause of security concerns.

“Whenever customer data is leaked it certainly sendstrepidations through the insurance industry,” he says. “Given thatmost data centers are not proximate to where the operations are,you are operating in the cloud, although it's a walled-off cloud.I'm not seeing a major rush to put all the data out there in acloud. When I look at cloud I think of timeshares. If I run avariable product off someone's data center, you are effectivelyrunning that business in the cloud. It's not necessarily a newconcept; it's just being presented differently.”