SEUSS Sayer

The end of the dot-com boom brought about the dismantling of many e-business groups formed by insurance carriers, but a recent study by research firm Celent Communications suggests top-tier carriers need to maintain their e-business groups and refocus them in five key areas. Using the acronym SEUSSStrategy, Education, Usability, Security, and StandardizationCelent senior analyst Matt Josefowicz believes insurers will face difficult integration issues in the future if they abandon their e-business groups.

It became fashionable for insurers to organize their Internet unit into an e-business group back in the late 1990s, Josefowicz says, because it allowed the company to react in what was then called Internet time. It also was a way to convince tech-savvy workers they werent joining some stodgy, old insurance carrier, but rather were with a company looking to build a strong electronic presence.

Today, with the Internet having become such an integral part of a carriers overall strategy, many companies feel the work of the e-business group can be rolled into the IT department. Josefowicz claims two factors have created the push to abandon the e-business group. One is tightening budgets, he says. The other is the way the Web has permeated the industry, becoming a key part of the overall technology infrastructure of the industry.

Celent has encouraged carriers to evolve their e-business groups into what Josefowicz calls Design, Build, and Maintain groups. If you just cut your e-business group flat, there is a potential to let the e-business get too decentralized within the enterprise and for different groups to go off in a lot of different directions without solving the local business problems, he says.

He believes carriers need to address e-business concerns on an enterprise-wide level. That doesnt mean you need to have a single group do all the work, but you do need at least a smaller and higher-level group to make sure all the groups doing the work and making the decisions are coordinating with each other, says Josefowicz.

Thats where SEUSS comes in. We encourage carriers to make sure those five areas are coordinated on an enterprise level even if the actual work is being done on an individual group level, says Josefowicz. He agrees knowledge of Web technology and Web strategy is no longer restricted to one segment of the organization, but carriers need to be careful about the companys direction. The risk is the loss of enterprise-wide vision for e-business, he says. It has the potential to have everybody going off in different directions from a technology point of view and to create an integration nightmare a couple of years down the line.

Whatever the group is called, Josefowicz believes maintaining some form of it is imperative. Its not that one body needs to be setting the overall direction, he says. But [carriers] need to be coordinating the needs of the business group and the needs of the enterprise to have a consistent technology infrastructure and interoperable applications.