Time to Decide

Reacting to things is not considered a strategic plan, and reacting is the position in which Scottsdale Insurance found itself. To become proactive, Scottsdale turned to a business intelligence tool from Moore Stephens Consulting Limited, according to Rob Crossley, Scottsdale's director of architecture.

The carrier was suffering from a lack of speed in the decision-making process, explains Crossley. “Prior to implementation [of bIntelligent], we had a very reactive information delivery model,” he says.

Each of the carrier's major business groups had an area Scottsdale called admin, which was staffed with business people with some technology training. If the underwriting manager or the claims manager had a need for some particular information, he or she would go to the related admin area, and a ticket would be sent to IT, where it would enter a queue. “Several days would go by before the answer would be sent back [to the business unit],” says Crossley. “The whole cycle was very reactive and very slow.”

The carrier's second concern involved the level of quality of the decision-making. To ensure better decisions, Crossley reports the company felt it needed a single data center where data could be scrubbed and cleansed so everyone in the company would know it was accurate and correct.

Scottsdale decided to address these challenges but was troubled by the lack of insurance knowledge among some business intelligence vendors. “It was crucial we have people who understand insurance to be part of this,” says Crossley.

Scottsdale found the Moore Stephens insurance group to be knowledgeable about the industry. “It seemed like it had a good core competency in technology and decision support systems, as well,” says Crossley.

The selection was made in late 2006, and the project was launched late in the first quarter of 2007. The speed at which it was completed impressed the carrier. “It was roughly one year, and that included the analysis, design, development, and rollout,” says Crossley.

Still, as with any project, some scope creep filtered in, he notes. “During design, there were several elements we were not going to include, but we worked very closely with the business units and we expanded our scope quite a bit, which pushed out our time lines,” he says. “I've gotten feedback from the business units that they felt even with the increase in scope, it still came in on time.”

The admin area system was retained, but today, instead of the admin users sending a request to the IT department, they do the work themselves. “The business units are very happy, and they have been using it quite extensively,” says Crossley. “The speed of decision-making has increased but not yet to the point where we want it to be. The people in admin can use the tool quickly and turn requests around, as opposed to bringing them into IT. We've at least saved one step.”

Although Scottsdale wanted to launch the project on 64-bit architecture, some security templates weren't ready. So, the carrier instead launched it on 32-bit architecture, indicates Crossley. This resulted in the carrier not being able to load as much data on the system as it would like. “When we launch on the 64 bit later this year, we'll be able to do the past 60 months of data and probably have the queue be 25 to 30 gigabytes,” says Crossley. “What we have now is the past two years of data, and the year-end numbers for the last five years. For what we have it seems to be working well.”

With the carrier's historical data in one place, business users can find the premium numbers for a certain region or class and compare them with previous months or year-end numbers from the last several years, states Crossley. Prior to the bIntelligent solution, the only way to acquire that information was through one-off reports.

Crossley has come across several examples where in the past it would have taken days to get an answer to a data question, and instead, the answer was produced within minutes. “I was doing some analysis for another project, and I used the tool to get some premium numbers by age and location, and it went very quickly,” he says.

Crossley believes the core of any financial services company is data and how the information is used. “Data is one of the key pillars,” he says. “Over the last three years, we've been able to strengthen that pillar. We've strengthened how we deliver information, and that is a key to our business strategy.”