Innovation Group has released the Innovation Data Mastery Maturity Model (IDMMM), a product designed to help insurers understand milestones and identifiers in the data mastery journey so they are better equipped to create a roadmap and strategy that maximizes the business value of solutions, including Innovation Group's Insurer Analytics.

As outlined in a corresponding whitepaper, the new IDMMM serves as the “handbook” for process improvements to control current and future data. According to Innovation Group, reaching the highest level of data mastery requires an enterprise commitment, investment, strategy and roadmap and maturation in five specific areas:

Strategy and governance
Management and people
Data integration
Data technology and tools
Data quality technology

Over the past 8 years, business intelligence (BI) and analytics have been top business priorities for insurers, as evidenced by the annual growth in budget. Insurers now understand they must undertake data quality initiatives within their own data programs to master their current “small data” challenges before big data overtakes projects and initiatives within the company, the company says. According to the company, the IDMMM can help insurers gain business insight in the interest of increasing revenue, decreasing expenses, improving customer relationships, and heightening ease of doing business for all stakeholders.

“Novarica research indicates that business intelligence and data-related efforts are top priorities for insurers in 2014,” explains Martina Conlon, principal, insurance, for Novarica. “Many insurers struggle to understand the relative effectiveness and maturity of their existing data architecture, processes and data strategy. Having an independent conceptual framework can be a useful tool for highlighting areas of strength and areas in need of development, as well as guiding insurers to the level of maturity needed to deliver strategic data analytics capabilities.”

Data Mastery, as previously defined by industry analysts, is the leveraging of internal and external data to gain business insight, increase revenue, decrease expenses, or improve ease of doing business, and gained importance in the insurance industry due to the overwhelming amount of data insurers handle daily. It should be noted that data mastery is more than just the tools to produce the insight, starting from Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) to data warehouses/data marts, reporting and analytics, data mining, BI presentation layer, GIS analysis, and of course, Big Data. It is the utilization of all of these technology elements along with people and process to create an overall benefit to the company.

“Many insurers are overwhelmed with information,” says Euan King, CEO North America Technology at Innovation Group. “[Moreover] without structures in place, [they] are not taking full advantage of these storehouses of knowledge. “[We] developed the IDMMM to help insurers gain control and prepare for increasing flows in the future. Our model helps insurers understand where they are today with respect to enterprise maturity and where they want to be in the future. By mastering their data, insurers can gain greater insights and be able to make more informed, data-based business decisions. It will also enable them to better define their goals and develop roadmaps so they can maximize data mastery investments.”

Data Mastery A 'Journey'

In the whitepaper, the company asserts that data mastery is a journey, rather than a project or program. Data mastery will, however, be critical for insurers over the next 3 to 5 years in a data-driven competitive marketplace. The report defines five groups with distinct characteristics, which are from lowest to highest in degree of mastery:

Data chaos
Data-driven silos
Information-driven enterprise
Knowledge-driven enterprise
Innovative leading enterprise

“It [has] been said for years that data is the lifeblood of the industry,” says Ben Moreland, senior business architect for Innovation Group and author of the whitepaper. “Today, more than ever, the ability to manage that flow and use it to your business advantage is critical. Insurers need to incorporate an enterprise data strategy, plus governance, and the support of senior management support to ensure that true data mastery is possible. Insurers need to take advantage of available data resources. It's no longer an option, it's an imperative.”

The Innovation Data Mastery Maturity Model is now available on the Innovation Group's website.

Insurer Analytics, a component of the market-leading Innovation Insurer suite, works hand-in-hand with Innovation Group's new IDMMM through a fully configurable, open architecture, analytics solution with train-of-thought analysis, advanced visualization, on demand MI, automated monitoring, web dashboard, sophisticated data engineering, and over 500 insurance-specific, out-of-the-box KPIs and reports. Designed and built for insurance on the Microsoft BI stack, Insurer Analytics features an insurance data model and capabilities that eliminate the additional time and set-up costs inherent to generic analytics solutions.

Insurer Analytics has been recognized over the last year with an array of industry awards, including, Celent's Model Insurer and the Vanguards in Insurance Practice (VIP).

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