According to a recent Accenture report, “From Digitally Disrupted to Digital Disruptor,” the industry is experiencing the first wave of large companies using technology as a driving force for strong and effective growth. Supporting Accenture's vision that “Every business is a digital business,” the previous decade, marked by digital startup companies that sparked phenomena, such as Instagram, Twitter and TripAdvisor, will be followed by a period of emergence, as traditional companies begin taking on the role of a digital giant.

In nearly every industry, business leaders are searching to determine their organization's place in the digital landscape. Companies are pushing for transformation, from technological followers to leaders, prepared to take advantage of recent digital innovations that promise growth and development.

Accenture's Technology Vision Report highlight six themes that reflect the current shifts in technological trends being used by the digital power brokers of the future. Companies such as GE, Disney and Tesco, for example, recognize the importance of redefining their companies' digital integration to further redefine digital in their industries: Big is the next big thing.

The insurance industry is not exempt from this fundamental shift to the digital realm. Becoming a digital business is more than just incorporating technology into an agency through mobile applications or web portals. Agencies that succeed in the future will be the ones that determine how technology can be used to reinvent themselves, staying ahead of other businesses in the industry, and also getting in front of dramatic changes in evolving technology.

Accenture's six themes highlight the evolution of key technologies, some of which are already central to digital explorations of leading enterprises. As a whole, the themes are representative of the fundamental shifts in assumptions that companies must make as they plan for the future.

Insurance industry leaders can use these six themes as they plan for the future success of their business. Accenture's detailed view of digital trends and capacities can help leaders in every industry draw insight and inspiration to become the innovative agencies of tomorrow.

Click through the following slides for more on the six themes.

Digital–physical blur: Extending intelligence to the edge

The interconnectedness of the digital and physical worlds continues to grow, as intelligence, automation, and digital machinery become more important to daily business, impacting the way we participate and control the physical world.

These connections have allowed customers to become more informed and better equipped to influence the ways the experience everything around them, and for businesses, real-time connections to the physical world allow both machines and employees to respond more quickly, and more intelligently.

Why now?

Explosion of connected devices: The installed base of the Internet of Things is estimated to reach approximately 212 billion in 2020. This will include 30 billion “connected (autonomous) things” that same year.
Increased bandwidth: Global IP traffic is expected to nearly double between 2013 and 2016, and broadband is expected to speed up more than twofold.
Advanced robotics: From agriculture to oilfields, advances in robotics are empowering human-robot collaboration in industries beyond the factory floor. Several leading car manufacturers have committed to bringing autonomous car technologies to market by 2020.
Rise of real-time analytics: Data sources are growing at an unprecedented velocity, and the ability to loop insights immediately back into the decision process is supporting automating responsive actions like never before. By 2017, more than 50 percent of analytics implementations will make use of event streams generated from instrumented machines, applications and/or individuals.

Next Steps

Accenture predicts that there will always be individuals who are eager to acquire new technologies to become better informed, while also enjoying different (and hopefully better) user experiences.

For insurers, this means staying ahead of the technological developments, and being eager to respond to the needs and desires of customers who are looking for new experiences for conducting business.

In the insurance industry, much of this is emerging with millennials, who represent a new demographic of clients, as well as agents. Millennials are keen on self-service and automated processes for doing business, but Accenture predicts that businesses' embrace of the next generation, overall, will be cautious.

Accenture anticipates three phrases of uptake. The first is to make business more efficient. In the second phase, businesses will see digital-physical systems create industry disruptions, as users' expectations evolve. The agencies that can proactively alter the users' experiences to fit these changes become the disrupters.

The third phase stems out of organizational response. Agencies will need to ask the right questions about how technological integration, such as automation, impacts customer interactions and expectations. Questioning whether or not the implementations open up new business opportunities, or whether the productivity equation changes in the workplace, are just some of the things that should be considered.

Through answering these questions, insurers can leverage the strengths of the machines alongside the strengths of the people, and set themselves apart from the rest with market-leading advantages.

Your 100-day plan

In 100 days, promote decisions at the edge by completing the following:

Take an inventory of devices at the edge of your network; segregate them by those used by humans and those that act on their own, such as sensors and embedded intelligence.
Catalog how data is currently being collected in your organization to drive business decisions. Understand how having more data about daily operations could improve business outcomes.
Define and prioritize both the ways in which consumers engage with your products or services and the locations where they engage. Brainstorm ways to deliver compelling user experiences that offer new insights into their decision-making.
Consider how you can influence behaviors or decision making to help consumers arrive at a favorable outcome for your mission or business.
Look to early adopters to learn what businesses in different industries are doing to enhance consumer experiences, enable field workers, and embed intelligence into their physical assets.
Organize a cross-functional mobility team between your IT and business organizations. Their objective will be to pilot relevant hardware innovations and test new consumer and employee digital-physical experiences.
Collaborate with your customer-facing business units to capture the types of edge decisions they often make. Determine how they will benefit by adding data with real time analytics at the point of action and create a strategy to deliver that solution.
Reevaluate your corporate privacy policy to address the new digital-physical interactions for your business. Data collection, usage, transparency, and user control (opt in/opt out) guidelines should be clearly addressed.
Uncover the types of decisions that can alleviate oversight obligations from middle management and start to build decision spaces for front-line workers to take autonomous actions.

From workforce to crowdsource: The rise of the borderless enterprise

Modern workforces will extend beyond human employees. Rather, it will consist of any user connected to the Internet. Cloud, social and collaboration technologies allow organizations to tap into different resources around the world that are ready to help.

According to Accenture, channeling these efforts to drive business can be a challenge, but the opportunities are enormous: Insurers can gain access to an immense workforce that is better suited for solving some of the industry's daily struggles, and in many cases, they will do it for free.

Why now?

Accelerated pace of IT change: The increasing pressure to rapidly deploy new technology is accentuating some of an enterprise's biggest pain points: market insight, innovation, and a need for highly specialized skills. These are areas for which crowdsourcing solutions are well suited.
Maturation of crowdsourcing platforms: Communities of shared interest have organically formed or are forming around almost every product, service, and idea that can be imagined. Crowdflower, Spigit, and Mechanical Turk are just a few of the collaboration platforms that are rapidly evolving to enable and orchestrate efficient solutions.
Strong case studies from early adopters: Some of the biggest market disrupters, such as Facebook and large enterprises including GE, are currently using crowdsourcing services to solve their most complex problems, and everyone is taking notice.

Next Steps

The report indicates that there is no shortage of people who are, surprisingly, ready and willing to work for little or no money by participating in online experiments such as contests and challenges, if they can be rewarded, whether it is through prizes, recognition, or a sense of pride.

The use of this extended workforce, however, can be challenging. Accenture provides guiding principles for planning and implementing platforms for crowdsourcing. Keeping clear objectives for crowdsourced exercises is critical for success, which stems from objective planning, as well as technology solutions that can drive users through the process.

It is also imperative to engage the expanded workforce. Providing motivation and a community feel is important for actually accomplishing tasks. When leveraged correctly, the benefits are immense. Insurers will find that they have better insight concerning the needs of their customers, and are able to produce more innovative products and services that serve client needs.

Your 100-day plan:

In 100 days, learn about the variety of options that contribute to the borderless enterprise and begin to create a strategy for how you can harness the crowd moving forward.

Identify any existing enterprise connections to established expanded workforce platforms.
Determine how your competitors are using crowdsourcing.
Evaluate the benefits your market research, product development and innovation functions could reap from using expanded workforce platforms.
Develop an initial strategy to engage existing online communities in support of your core functions. Where it aligns with your core business, create a catalog of existing online communities that are specific to market-research and product-development functions.
Consider assets from the open-source software community that are usable for your core IT functions and begin planning how to integrate them.
Design and implement a pilot to leverage the established expanded workforce that most aligns with the nature of your business.

Data supply chain: Putting information into circulation

Data technologies rapidly evolve, but most innovations are adopted in a piecemeal fashion, resulting in underutilized data.

The Accenture report describes data ecosystems as “complex and littered with data silos,” which limits the value that insurers can get out of their own data, simply because it is difficult to access. In order to leverage the value of their data, companies should consider treating data as a supply chain.

The supply chain method will allow data to flow easily through the entire organization, and eventually through each company's ecosystem of partners, according to Accenture's theory.

Why Now?

Corporate data silos: Data is the lifeblood of every digital organization, but businesses are struggling to access, share, and analyze much of the data they already have. Through 2015, 85 percent of Fortune 500 organizations will be unable to exploit big data for competitive advantage.1
Rising data volumes: In addition to the data that organizations already collect, new external data sources are available, providing new opportunities for data insights. The digital universe is doubling every two years and is expected to grow to 40 trillion gigabytes (more than 5,200 gigabytes for every man, woman, and child in 2020).
Maturing data technology: The tools and technology required to build a data platform, ensuring data access and velocity, are available and in use. For example, a reported 20 percent of enterprises are already using NoSQL. With the foundation of these technologies, the integrated, end-to-end data supply chain is possible.

Next Steps

As the sheer volume of data begins to grow, so does the scale and complexity of the data supply chain. It can become difficult to add to data, and leverage the data's value once it has been manipulated.

The solution, according to Accenture, may come from cognitive computing. Rather than being programmed for a specific task, the machine learning systems would gain knowledge from data as “experience,” and generalize what it has learned in upcoming situations.

Cognitive computing builds on the concept by incorporating components of artificial intelligence to convey insights in ways that allow humans and machines to accomplish what they previously could not accomplish alone. At its most advanced, according to Accenture, cognitive computing will be the truly intelligent data supply chain, masking complexity by harnessing the power of data to help business users and answer strategic questions in a data-driven way.

For many insurance companies, large-scale cognitive computing may be out of reach. However, there are more practical and affordable ways to leverage this technology. Insurers should focus on tackling defined problems on a smaller scale. Machine learning techniques can be leveraged to accomplish practical, cognitive goals, not just large-scale issues.

Your 100-day plan

In 100 days, begin to develop a comprehensive strategy around laying the foundation for your data supply chain.

Start to build an inventory of your data, beginning with your most frequently accessed and time-relevant data— which will be given first access to your data platform and accelerated on it.
Identify any manual, time-consuming data curation processes (e.g., tagging, cleansing) for potential replacement with machine learning algorithms.
Identify data silos within your organization (e.g., HR, finance, engineering), along with corresponding data needs that are currently unmet across the business.
Begin to simplify/federate access to trusted data. Create a strategy for standardizing data access via the data platform. Solutions may be hybrid, utilizing a combination of traditional middleware and API management, or even a PaaS offering.
Prioritize your individual data supply chains to develop a road map for implementing the data supply chain at scale.
While building your platform, start looking outside your company for external data sources that can be incorporated to complement existing data and help lead to more complete insights.

Harnessing Hyperscale: Hardware is back (and never really went away)

The last decade was marked by innovation in software, but the hardware world is gaining steam as a hotbed for new development with demand for bigger, faster, and lower-cost data centers.

Now, more than ever, hardware matters in transforming organizations into digital businesses with access to unlimited computing power that can be turned on and off as needed.

Why Now?

Rising demand for scale: Across industries, demand for processing at scale is surging. Businesses need reliable hardware to support the immense amounts of data processed for predictive analytics and real-time insights.
Hardware and server architecture innovation surge: From advances in storage to power consumption to processors to server architecture, infrastructure innovations such as nonvolatile memory are paving the way for faster, cheaper, and bigger hyperscale systems.
Open source: Facebook's Open Compute Project is accelerating the adoption of infrastructure innovations by sharing those breakthroughs freely. Founded in 2011, the Open Compute Project has already grown to more than 60 official members and thousands of participants.

Next Steps

In this shift in IT strategy, many companies are leveraging hardware innovation on a piecemeal basis. Some are going as far to build their own hyperscale systems to give their companies a competitive edge.

But even if insurers do not decide to take on the task of building their own infrastructure, it is important to consider the future of the company as a digital business, and whether or not the infrastructure and skills to support it are present.

Going forward, businesses will see the advantage of hyperscale technology. It provides the opportunity to decrease operational cost of running data centers, and for high performance companies, hyperscale systems have become a vital part to their business.

Your 100-Day Plan

In 100 days, make sure your organization is informed about the available hyperscale technology options.

Ensure that your IT organization is aware of consortiums and/or is testing the benefits of the latest hardware innovations. Identify those that are most important to your business.
Identify your data storage needs and the magnitude of devices producing data in your network (including sensors, smart meters, devices, and data centers). Forecast their expected usage based on one-year and three-year business growth strategies.
Create a plan that allows key data assets to be portable across architectures.
Explore participation in open-source communities such as the Open Compute Project to leverage emerging hardware innovations.

The business of applications: Software as a core competency in a digital world

With the increase of mobile technology, many businesses are moving from enterprise applications to apps. While there will always be large, complex company software systems to support large organizations, it is necessary for IT developers to customize the systems with updates and patches.

However, the current shift requires developers to create simpler, more modular, and custom apps as large businesses move toward greater IT agility. For business and IT leaders, determining the application development roles in digital businesses is important, but so is the transformation of the application development.

Why Now?

Digital transformation of enterprises: IT applications have become the primary driver for growth and differentiation for enterprises.
Accelerated pace of IT change: The increasing push to rapidly deploy new technology is increasing the pressure on IT to provide a faster way to develop and deploy the applications that are driving corporate digital strategies.
Maturation of application platform providers: PaaS players are offering ready-made data service platforms, with sets of services already connected and instant sets of app families available. Tibco, Apigee, and Salesforce are already offering solutions that provide the foundation for a customized enterprise app experience.
Rising consumer and user expectations: Customers and employees are looking for consumer-grade experiences everywhere. They are pressing IT to give them, in the workplace, the kinds of low-cost, accessible, and often intelligent apps they use every day on their own mobile devices.

Next Steps

IT and business executives need to re-examine the skills and organizational structures that need to be in place to support these new technological arrangements. As insurers become more aware of technologies and opportunities, IT will also need to develop a better understanding of the insurer's business strategies that will be impacted by technological development.

From what Accenture predicts, in the future, business strategies will become inseparable from technological innovation, and multidisciplinary teams will become common in business settings. User experience skill will become a necessity to drive the adoption of new applications, and as data is collected from these applications and distributed throughout the organization, user experience skills will need to be cultivated and honed through hiring and training.

However, Accenture notes that it is not just tech skills that will be in demand, as business processes are not set in stone in the world of apps. This gives insurers the opportunity to move beyond technology innovation, enabling them to seek innovation in the underlying processes, emphasizing the roles of the business process orchestrator and program manager.

Additionally, apps also have different expectations for maintenance. With traditional software, deployment is the end of the development cycle, but with apps, deployment is just the first iteration. Applications will, essentially, be “forever beta,” or always evolving.

Your 100-Day Plan

In 100 days, begin to develop a comprehensive strategy that will lay out the foundation for enterprise app development.

Appoint a digital champion to coordinate development of your app strategy across organizations in your enterprise.
Determine your ability to enable cloud and mobile apps against your existing SOA, API Management, and PaaS investments. Based on this evaluation, start preparing a strategy to separate your back-end services from front- end apps.
Start creating a list of enterprise-level apps to be developed. Work cross-functionally across business units to prioritize the items on your list.
Start planning a pilot for your highest priority apps that will deploy in conjunction with the enterprise app store. Aim to validate the readiness of your app production environment.
Review and begin to update your app process and app governance strategy. Prepare to shift toward a hybrid buy and build environment, where your IT buy for front-end functions will decrease.

Architecting resilience: “Built to survive failure” becomes the mantra of the nonstop business

Digital businesses need to be able to support a number of demands for nonstop processes, services and systems. Shifting client and employee expectations will create the need for an “always-on” IT infrastructure and security. Resilient practices in these situations can mean the difference between success and failure.

IT must adopt a new mindset to ensure that systems remain continuous, dynamic and accessible, but are also resilient to failure and attack.

Why now?

Digital transformation of enterprises: Transforming to a digital business implicitly increases a company's exposure to risk through IT failures. More business processes are interconnected and automated, all of which become potential points of failure. The average cost of data center downtime by minute has risen by 41 percent since 2010.
Increased cyber threats: It's not just about gaining access to systems; cyber criminals are also trying to bring them down. Denial of service attacks are increasing in frequency and size. The number of attacks has increased by 58 percent in the last year.
Increased IT complexity: More systems are being integrated, and continuous improvement is becoming the IT norm. But constant change to increasingly complex systems is introducing more risk than ever before.
The expectation of “always on”: In a digital world, whether your system is under attack, hit by a storm, or just being updated, the expectation is that it always works.

Next Steps

According to the report, resilience is the new high ground for CIOs who take their strategic business roles seriously.

But this calls for more than just putting in the right security structures and deploying the best systems. Instead, a wholesale shift in mindset is necessary. Accenture claims that this mindset should be rooted in the context of business risk and stem from a deep understanding of the constant threats of business disruptions, such as hackers or internal updates, and the risks that these threats pose to the operational community and brand value.

Insurance leaders should look beyond simple compliance when addressing resilience. Compliance, according to Accenture, means complacency. Leaders do not follow compliance frameworks; they set them.

Your 100-Day Plan

In 100 days, consider where you can make the most impact in building a more resilient company.

Shift conversations with senior executives about security to conversations about mitigating business risks. Talk about the benefits of designing for failure.
Map and prioritize security, operational, and failure scenario threat models to existing and planned business operations.
Develop a strategy to handle elastic business demand for IT services.
Reaffirm a force-ranking alignment of IT systems and their dependent components with business-driven KPIs for success and downside revenue risk. Evaluate the top five for resilience.
Test your resilience by planning a “game day” exercise for IT operations.
Consider hiring an outside security firm to attack your infrastructure, monitor the events internally, and reconcile with logs from the security firm to see where your defenses are deficient.
Perform a data security review. Determine from a business risk perspective where data can reside; consider using the public cloud as a disaster recovery solution.
If not already doing it, plan a pilot for software-defined networks and a software-defined data center. Start small and scale over time.
Create a governance model for auditing and testing the entire ecosystem of IT system and process dependencies— both internally and externally. Be sure it includes policies for managing capacity utilization and using hybrid infrastructure.

Conclusion: The pace of technology change is accelerating

Over the last decade, we have witnessed a technological explosion. From cell phones, to tablets, to Twitter, to Netflix, digital technologies have evolved at lightning speeds.

Accenture's Technology Vision witnessed more and more large organizations, outside of the IT industry, becoming digital businesses, instead of being pressured by it. Leveraging their resources, these companies are not just reacting to technology disruption, but embracing digital development as a vital part to the success of their business.

Within the coming decade, traditional companies, including insurers, will need to transform their views of technology, becoming digital giants instead of following the trends. Examining the future of the insurance industry's digital journey will be necessary for staying competiti

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