A Paperless Agency? Dont Bet On It Just Yet!
Agents have been hearing for years the promise that their agencies will be paperless. One agency says it has managed to achieve a sense of that vision, but a consultant disagrees over whether this is truly a paperless office, or whether such an achievement is possible or even advisable for the average agency.
In Clayton, N.Y., Thousand Islands Agency has become a paperless agency, contends owner Ed Higgins. With equipment already on hand, and within three months after creating the system folders for all his paperwork, the agency has gone paperless.
For an investment of less than $1,000, Mr. Higgins set up a couple of scanners at his employees work stations to allow them to scan, then throw away paper documents of any form.
However, organizing this took a little tweaking of the software, and Mr. Higgins–who also chairs the Agent Council for Technology at the Alexandria, Va.-based Independent Insurance Agents of America–admits that most agents have only a novices interest in technology.
"The paperless agency, like the paperless office, is never going to happen," contends Judy Johnson, vice president and insurance industry analyst for the Stamford, Conn.-based Meta Group, a technology research and consulting organization.
While Mr. Higgins has developed the file system on his computer, Ms. Johnson observed, paper still needs to scanned into the system.
This, Ms. Johnson pointed out, is an imaging system. While it works for Mr. Higgins, it would be too cumbersome for the average independent agent more used to leafing through a document than scrolling through a series of computer files.
The major hurdle to going truly paperless is that the independent agent needs quick access to information, and that differs from an IT professionals concept of creating a series of files, according to Ms. Johnson. The solution: talking about their vision of a system, if they can find the time, she said.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, August 6, 2001. Copyright 2001 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
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