One of my favorite song lyrics (and good luck figuring out whoactually said it first) goes, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, butnobody wants to die.” The more I read and discuss data andanalytics with insurers and analysts the more I am reminded of thislyric.

There can't be an insurer alive who doesn't want—or need—sometype of analytics solution, whether it is for underwriting, claimsor even billing. But it takes a fearless insurer—one not afraid totackle the near impossible (or at least the very difficult)—tobegin the necessary work on their data to enable the analyticstools.

I recently asked some smart people what insurers need to do toimprove data quality so they could gain some benefits from theanalytics and business intelligence tools available to them. We'llpublish several opinions on this topic later this week, but Iwanted to share one of them with you.

Bill Jenkins, a long-time CIO with Penn National and now amanaging partner with Agile Insurance Analytics, wrote:

“Insurers have spent millions of dollars on dataintegration, data mastery, and data warehousing initiatives only tobe disappointed in the results returned from these investments. Amain cause of the disappointment has been the inability of theorganization to properly manage the underlying data to be used inthese solutions in order to achieve results that are credible,reliable, and timely. In effect, the lack of high quality data hasbeen the leading culprit for these unfulfilledexpectations.”

The key words in his response might just be “spent millions ofdollars.” When most companies spend millions of dollars on aproject they expect it to perform right out of the box.Unfortunately, there is no out-of-the-box solution to dataintegrity; these projects involve an internal struggle to managethe data in place and spin it into golden yarn that offers greatvalue to insurance companies.

There is a reason we use the term “data mining.” Just asprospectors searched for valuable commodities under the earth, datais often buried within an insurance carrier and needs to beprospected. Carriers don't use a pickaxe—or dynamite for thatmatter—to find the valuable veins inside the data, but the searchrequires the same amount of patience that comes before any greatdiscovery.

Companies need strategy for virtually everything they do, butcertainly a data strategy has to be tops among the strategists ifcarriers want to achieve greatness as a company. Greatness usuallydoesn't happen by accident—and almost never in the insuranceindustry. In the future it will come when carriers master theirdata and begin to receive the desired results that unlock themystery within their own data.