Dusting Off the Process

Its been said with time comes a fresh perspective. Now that the dust has settled from the springtime industry conferences, Ive been thinking maybe a bit of that dust formed some interesting patterns.

Not surprisingly, a recurring theme in sessions either touched upon or dealt directly with the business-IT partnership. What coalesced for me later, though, was, to paraphrase a former Presidential campaign slogan: Its the process, stupid!
The business process, to be precise. Under-standing the process often is one of those assumed things. But theres evidence insurers dont quite have their processes down to an explainable science. Take, for example, these comments that came from different sessions addressing various topics at IASA in June:

Kimberly Harris, Gartner Group: Were not pushing business to think long term of what it needs from systems, what its vision iscreating a concrete blueprint about how it plans to grow and what that means for the business and the technical foundation.

Rod Travers, Robert E. Nolan Company: Theres a whole focus around business processes we think is very healthy. This kind of trend in the marketplace is whats driving business process management and systems.

Vladimir Orivic, Insurance Technol-ogy Group: Creating a business-IT architecture is essential.It is a set of standards around policies, processesabout the use of IT and specific business goals. It looks like a model of your process and application flows, of your infrastructure, and how they [interact] between each other.

Many carriers continue to be challenged by the struggle to achieve a productive business-IT alliance. Much of the discussion focuses on operations and structurehaving IT people work with lines of business (or vice versa); having PMOs, IT governance, or the CIO sit at the executive table. These are important, even critical, but business processes are where both worlds functionally collide and create the work for these organizational and cultural structures.

The process then logically should dictate the operational structure. It also would seem logical the business side take responsibility for the process and ensuring promised benefits are delivered, since business has designed the process and is on the line for the results. IT must not drive the process but facilitate it by improving quality and user experience.

This process awareness can be applied to anythingfrom outsourcing to purchasing internal systems (for these topics, see pages 18 and 22). An ad I saw recently for an electric company included the slogan: The power behind everything you do. The same can be said about processes, and once a company truly understands process requirements and puts them first, that insurer will be empowered for success.

Sharon S. Schwartzman
Editor-in-Chief

P.S. For readers interested in further insight into the business-IT partnership, Catherine Brune, SVP and CTO of Allstate, will deliver a keynote on the topic at TechDEC 2004 in October. For more information, check out www.tech-dec.com.