ECM:A Path to Profit

However, he contends it's been a major step for companies to go from content capture to content management. In fact, most insurers haven't fully completed digitizing documents, whether by scanning or by digital origination.

"Insurers have struggled with getting the front end more digitized," says Craig LeClair, senior analyst in the information group at Forrester Research. "They still are working on that and have been for years."

Additionally, insurers' legacy imaging efforts at times have created problems of their own, namely, by creating document repository islands; that is, claims might have installed one imaging and storage solution, underwriting another, and so on. Neither department had access to information from the other, and no system was robust enough to be expanded on an enterprise scale.

The Westfield Group is in the process of consolidating different document management platforms to IBM's DB2 Content Manager, which it put into production in August 2005. The first stage of the project, which replaced five scanners and an optical jukebox tied to the mainframe with two high-speed scanners and eight Linux-based application and content servers, was converting nearly 11 million archived policy documents.

"It has helped us to view the information we use for customer service requests more quickly," says Wayne Hartzler, project manager at Westfield, adding the company now has consistent retrieval of any document within two seconds.

Future deployments will address expanding the Content Manager system to the claims department, including obsolescing a department-level imaging solution used for some claim documents. More important, this will serve as the foundation for a number of projects the company has under way it believes will increase efficiency and provide greater profitability, such as fully electronic underwriting files, a print-reduction project targeted to deliver more policies electronically and reduce costs of printing and mailing, and expanded access by agents via the Web to content in the system's central repository.

In forming its ECM strategy, a carrier should assess all the different types of content–not just documents–it needs to manage. Photographs come first to mind, but so could other digital media such as audio or video files.

IBM's Content Manager also has been at the heart of ACUITY's ECM initiatives and in place at the insurer since 1998. In 2002, ACUITY added Content Manager OnDemand to give agents and field staff access to content via the Web and IBM's Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) for internal staff. In 2005, it built a new interface in-house, called Web Imaging System, to provide staff easier retrieval of content from the EIP system.

In addition to documents–such as computer-output PDFs of policies issued, electronically received incoming documents, and image capture–the system manages digital media including photographs taken by field staff, agents, or third-party inspectors and appraisers. It also stores recorded statements claims staff complete using either desktop-based or handheld digital recorders from Dictaphone.

Part of effectively storing content is being able to find it, and that generally requires applying indexing metadata. "Our imaging operators identify and index scanned documents, and employees who upload photos from their PCs use drop-down menus in Photograbber," an interface ACUITY built for the content management system, relates Laura Conklin, ACUITY's vice president of business consulting. "Employees using the Dictaphone system enter identifying information after recording by using either the PC application or the handheld's touchpad."

This indexing not only helps users of Content Manager find content but enables workflow automation, such as determining based on the recording type whether an audio file should be routed for transcription or simply archived. Content Manager also allows users to attach annotations to digital assets stored in the system, with those annotations stored in a separate layer and the original file left untouched. The system uses an NT-based repository for digitized documents and indexing information, a library server for images and audio files, and an object server that houses indexing information for the library server.

One of the key roles of ECM is to be the repository of all corporate-record information. This is particularly valuable to an insurer's compliance efforts as is the ability of ECM systems to track when content has been accessed and by whom.

"Driving down the cost of compliance is something insurers definitely are trying to target" via ECM, reports James Watson, president of Doculabs. Costs are reduced by being able to locate quickly needed information with the assurance it is the "single source of truth."

Compliance was a motivator for State Auto's implementation of Mobius ViewDirect TCM (Total Content Management) platform. The system dates back to 1998, when the insurer deployed it to make its microfiche-based accounting archive Y2K compliant. Since then, the system has evolved to become the central repository for many othertypes of content, including output from various production systems, staff-created documents, and scanned incoming documents. As part of the evolution, State Auto created an interface called S2M (send to Mobius), available in several of the document-production systems staff members use, to make it easier to check content into the repository.

The system has continued to help the insurer deal with compliance requirements, such as managing its annual employee code-of-conduct questionnaire. "It used to take the audit department up to four months to get signed copies back," according to Allen Kadlec, business systems analyst at State Auto.

Having an electronic completion and routing process has made it easier for staff to complete the questionnaires, and by using workflow indicators to determine what forms simply could be archived and which required follow-up with employees, the process has changed from a full-time responsibility during the audit period to a part-time task that takes just a week to complete. State Auto's compliance efforts also are aided by the fact the system is the final repository for documents, which cannot be altered once saved to the system.

Although Mobius is an enterprisewide application today, Kadlec notes the company originally had no plans for the extent the system would reach. "As we added more and more content, and it was so easy to use, it became a system people are dependent upon," he says.

This type of evolution isn't uncommon in content management. For instance, the original goal of Fireman's Fund was to reduce the amount of paper being printed and the costs associated with printing and mailing policies.

In early 2003, it deployed its Policy View Online (PVO) system, which incorporated Xenos' d2e document data stream repurposing system to convert the AFP (IBM's Advanced Function Presentation language) policy files generated by eight different policy administration systems to Web-viewable PDFs. Mark Brennan, application services manager at Fireman's Fund, reports the system saved the insurer nearly $2.5 million a year.

But what it also did was simplify life for agents and staff by no longer having to access separately different administration systems for policy information. "That's really the biggest net gain in the entire project," says Brennan. "The end result has been much more than paper reduction." In effect, Xenos has evolved from a single-goal system to an enterprise application, one whose reach will be expanded further in an $80 million project the insurer is undertaking to consolidate and upgrade its various administration systems to ISO's AscendantOne.

Centrally managing documents, digital media, and other "unstructured" content is important, but the vision of ECM is even broader. It includes the ability to give users a single point of access to unstructured, semistructured, and structured content that relates to whatever task they are trying to perform.

Rather than trying to combine documents and data in a single repository, insurers have developed dashboards, workstations, and other portal-type solutions that supply users with access to this information in a federated manner, searching and retrieving across multiple sources. For instance, State Auto's Web-based AgentSite portal provides agents transactional data, such as business processed in the nightly cycle. From that data-based list, agents easily can click to retrieve documents, such as new declarations pages, associated with those transactions.

Often, however, even employees at companies that have deployed robust, centralized ECM systems use different systems to get at information: the proprietary ECM user interface to access completed documents, photos, or audio files as well as user interfaces to various administration systems for policy, claims, and billing data. However, what insurers have done is make the interaction among those systems smoother.

Westfield, for example, has put a link within its policy processing system that tells staff ancillary documents are available in the Content Manager system. At State Auto, internal staff can access the document repository from either a stand-alone desktop application or via the AgentSite portal, which many underwriters prefer to use. Document-level security, a key component of any content management system, ensures users have the same access to documents regardless of entry point.

"Most users have access to about 95 percent of the documents that are currently archived," Kadlec says.

Although true enterprise content management is broader than any one activity, two areas of ECM are worth singling out: Web content and e-mail management.

Insurers are well aware of the benefit of driving transactions and inquiries to the Web channel. "Companies see the value of putting as much information as possible into the field for the agents. It gives them more content–not only the [policy] applications but the knowledge base and the rates and rules–which allows companies to push a lot of the underwriting decisions out to the agents," Stern says.

What hasn't seen widespread adoption in the insurance industry, though, are systems that manage the publication and life cycle of Web content–company information, product detail, agents' manuals, press releases, and so forth. With few exceptions, the industry has left this publishing in the hands of IT. However, this approach falls short by creating publishing "bottlenecks" and not addressing efficient content reuse.

At Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BlueCross), nearly 500 users out of 3,900 total employees have been given access to Interwoven's TeamSite, the insurer's Web content management system, which manages both intranet and Internet content. Julie Atkins, the insurer's vice president of IT, says it was important to distribute control of content outside of IT.

"It gives our users the ability to manage content, and IT manages the security of it," she says. Within the various business units, select staff members have the authority to publish final content to the various BlueCross sites. The remaining TeamSite users access the system for document preparation as well as creating page templates.

The system gives BlueCross automated control over the life cycle of content, including routing, approvals, access controls, and scheduling of publication and removal of site content. While BlueCross hasn't assigned a dollar value to the system, Atkins indicates automating a previously manual publication process has enabled the insurer to grow the amount of content available with no addition to staff. "We've increased our number of deploys by hundreds of percent," she says. "Our Web usage also has gone up."

Although e-mail is electronic content, insurers (and most companies in general) have struggled with how to manage e-mail within their ECM strategy. Most simply have chosen to let e-mail exist outside the ECM environment.

"As more and more business is done in the insurance sector via e-mail–certainly in commercial lines where the quote process is done via e-mail–it's going to change," predicts Rick Tucker, director of marketing at Doculabs. "We have to have a way of bringing that content together."

Almost universally, ECM vendors can offer companies some level of integration with e-mail clients. The problem with e-mail management is not integration but what e-mail content should be managed. "It's hard to determine which individual e-mails are company record, but we want to have an easy way to store them as a record once we do," says Westfield's Hartzler, explaining the company is planning to deploy an interface between its Lotus Notes e-mail client and the Content Manager system.

Approaches to managing e-mail vary, but most require users to initiate the process. Some vendors use the e-mail client itself as the main content management interface, where folders and subfolders exist into which users can drag and drop both e-mails as well as content files from other applications and in which they can search for information. An alternative is to create an e-mail address for the content manager system where users can forward e-mails that should be archived.

ACUITY, for instance, is working on a project called E-Box to do just that. "E-Box will allow users to route e-mails and attachments to Content Manager," says Tom Braun, information systems team manager at ACUITY. "Initially, the system will parse the information and present it to an indexer who will determine where it belongs. Ultimately, we'll give the sender the ability to apply the indexing information."

This will enable ACUITY to store any e-mail and its attachments, including voice-mail recordings that originate from the insurer's VoIP phone system. For instance, a voice message left by a claimant calling an adjuster could be made part of the content record for that claim. Ultimately, ACUITY plans to consolidate all its different content-related interfaces into one.

State Auto's S2M interface in Microsoft Outlook already permits users to send e-mails to its Mobius system. However, rather than storing individual attachments, the system converts the entire e-mail to PDF format. Indexing is part manual, part automatic. For variable information, such as policy number, users must enter the indexing data. The interface automatically applies nonconfigurable information, such as date and time stamps.

The ultimate intent of ECM is to increase efficiency and, therefore, drive profitability, which are goals insurers are achieving. "Most of the documents [staff and agents] view in Mobius we no longer print, so we save not only paper, printing, and mailing time but also people time," says Kadlec. "We effectively have eliminated the need for 'snail mail' and empowered agents to provide faster customer service through our ECM strategy."

One part of the project, which eliminated printing of agents' copies of personal lines declarations pages, was reported by Mobius to have saved State Auto $170,000 annually. While State Auto hasn't put a dollar amount on the total impact of ECM, Kadlec does describe it as "substantial."

Likewise, Conklin estimates the entire Content Manager system saves ACUITY $6 million annually in processing and personnel. "There are many hard-dollar benefits, such as eliminating cassette tapes, paper documents, photographs, and mailing costs. But there also are other benefits such as improved audio quality, faster access to content, and faster service times," she says.

ACUITY attributes part of the staff productivity levels it has been able to achieve to having an effective ECM platform that allows users to access quickly a wide variety of content and that supports automated workflow. Conklin reports ACUITY was found to employ nearly 40 percent less staff than other companies its size in a recent benchmarking by an independent consultancy.

"Or to put it another way," she sums up, "we'd have to hire 300 more people who sat and did nothing in order to operate as inefficiently as other carriers."