IASA 2011: IT Town Hall Provides Forum for Leaders

Against a backdrop of continued economic uncertainty, IT professionals are challenged to deliver the highest level of technical capability to the business in the most cost-effective manner. Wednesday's IT Town Hall shares the experiences and insight of industry professionals and audience members who can provide answers to some of the key questions being asked across the industry.

The IT Town Hall is a perennial favorite, and for good reason. “This isn't a traditional panel presentation or even a Q&A,” says session moderator Rod Travers, executive vice president, Robert E. Nolan Company. “The whole point is for the audience to be active in the discussion. It's an open forum for people to share successful ideas and learning experiences.”

This year's Town Hall features more panelists than ever before from carriers, analyst firms, and solution providers. Fielding topics will be Mary Ellen Freyermuth, director of MIS, Catholic Mutual Group; Alfred Goxhaj, CIO, Philadelphia Insurance Company; Donald Light, senior analyst, Celent; Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner; Don Goodenow, director, product management and insurance solutions, StoneRiver; and Euan King, CEO, North American technology, Innovation Group.

Solution-Driven

The audience sets the tone of the Town Hall, which will open by surveying the crowd for the top two topics to discuss. Where the Town Hall progresses from there is up to the participants; however, some areas in particular are likely to be candidates for spirited discussion.

One hot topic is how the downturn in the economy has continued to impact IT. Carriers across every sector of insurance are asking whether the current state of lean operations for IT represents a “new normal,” or whether resource-strapped IT departments expect to see increased budgets as the economy recovers and the projected hardening of the insurance market begins.

“This is a topic near and dear to the hearts of several panelists,” Travers says.

As carriers struggle to operate most efficiently, they need to base their decision-making on reliable business intelligence. On the analytics front, new and updated tools are proliferating, whether used to optimize functions at the operational level or guide day-to-day tactical decisions. In particular, business stakeholders are looking to capitalize on these tools in the areas of underwriting, fraud, and product and market development.

In turn, IT is being asked to implement and support these tools, which often touch multiple databases and systems. Panel and audience members will be able to discuss their experiences over the past year with analytics.

Another pressing topic for insurers is social media. “The marketing side of the business is clamoring for social media capabilities. That creates inevitable need for IT to support, from a technical standpoint, a company's social media presence,” Travers says.

Prime areas for discussion include what forms of social media are being adopted, how to integrate it into your technology infrastructure, and how to ensure that it creates a quality representation of your company.

Social media has been enabled by Web 2.0 technologies. Another area of Web 2.0 that is top of mind for insurers today is cloud computing. In recent months—despite some high-visibility negative press around outages in cloud services—the business side has become more comfortable with cloud computing because of the ubiquity of the term as well as use of content-focused cloud services in their personal lives.

Mobile Tech

Mobile technology is another topic on the IT Town Hall agenda. By the end of 2011, more than 1 billion people around the world will own smart phones or other mobile devices such as tablet computers. Employees are increasingly familiar with next-generation mobile technologies in their own lives, and customers are demanding more and more mobile-driven capabilities.

Insurers are looking to other sectors of financial services and even to other industries, trying to determine what opportunities mobile technology creates for their own operations. “Mobile represents an avenue to provide service to additional channels and reduce costs; however, the challenge for insurers is how to take the highly transactional model of other sectors and apply it to insurance. We have to sort out the seeds from the chaff and determine the true upside of mobile technology for the industry,” Travers says.

In this new world, IT departments are challenged with how to extend mobile services to customers and how to incorporate mobile devices that employees demand into their infrastructure. They need to manage new risks of mobile and avoid the complexity that can arise with a highly distributed environment.

“Mobile is both a challenge and opportunity for insurers. On the one hand you have a simplified platform that is well suited for workers on-the-go such as claims staff, agents, and executives. On the other hand you have a whole new set of emerging standards, infrastructure, and security issues that IT must now deal with,” Travers says.

“What is often happening today is that employees discover the convenience and applicability of tablets and other mobile devices and realize how productive they can be. Then informal adoption begins to take hold before IT can establish the necessary infrastructure,” he adds.

Other areas of discussion may include managing IT consolidation created by mergers and acquisitions and finding the right solutions and vendor-partners quickly amidst the crowded solutions marketplace. Modernizing IT management and systems development—including agile methods, portfolio and project management, skill and capabilities management, performance scorecards, accountabilities, and so on—are all prime areas for discussion.

And not to be overlooked is the issue of how to find and retain the best talent, which has continued to be a pressing concern for IT departments despite a high unemployment rate.

“Even though the jobless rate is high, an ongoing issue for IT departments is finding the best people,” Travers says. “Now, with the economy poised for recovery, the issue will evolve into how to retain the good people you already have.”

Panelists and audience members will share their real-world insight into these topics and more.

“One thing is certain—we will end up talking about several things that are not planned,” Travers says. “That is the nature and design of the open forum.”