Speed, Agility and Mobility Among Town Hall Topics

Knight concurs that the speed of change is a challenge for insurers, adding that the need to separate hype from reality complicates the issue. "I've been through a lot of tech lifecycles — those that got adopted and those that were abandoned along the way," he says. "What we want to focus on in the town hall is how companies can create a strategic direction involving IT that is flexible and adaptable to both the speed of change and the useful technologies that ultimately emerge."

One of the hottest emerging technologies has been cloud computing. "The cloud sessions at the IASA conference were among the most popular sessions at this year's event, which goes to show how much interest there is behind it," Travers says. "We'll be talking about different facets of cloud—moving your database to the cloud, concerns about security and control, and the types of successes companies have already had with it."

"As we go down the cloud path, we will see cloud for core and cloud for noncore on different lifecycles," Knight predicts. "Cloud for noncore is already being done every day, whereas carriers are more careful about putting core solutions in the cloud."

Innovation and

Big Data

Innovation was another topic on the minds of panelists and participants.

"Everyone is talking about innovation, but not everybody is talking about the same definition," Trembly claims. "It's important to realize that innovation in insurance will be different from technological innovation in other areas. Insurance innovation is not necessarily having a cutting-edge environment."

Furtado agrees. "Too many companies hear 'innovation,' and think it doesn't apply to them because they're a mainstream company," she says. "However, every insurer has the potential to be innovative. You might have a great way of doing ideation, a formalized process of creating new concepts, or things that improve your processes or cut down time dramatically to create better or more effective products, processes, services, or technology that are accepted by the customer or marketplace."

Big data is also top of mind for insurers today. "Many insurers are looking for the ability to rapidly and cost-effectively bring large amounts of structured and unstructured data together to get insights and trends," Furtado says. "Even though insurers are experts in data analysis, the challenge is that the explosion of unstructured data—images, email, social data—is something they are not trained to deal with. It's a real struggle."

The town hall looked at more traditional concerns as well, including disaster recovery and data security.

"It's a cat-and-mouse game between hackers and those of us who are in charge of security because what we do this year in terms of preventive measures might not apply next year," Trembly says. "You take one step forward and they take two steps forward. You have to make up that difference. It's a subject we don't like to talk about because any intrusion is a black mark on reputations. But it's something that we all agree is a key topic."

In both security and disaster recovery, companies are struggling with ever more stringent best practices, regulatory requirements, and contractual demands. "There has definitely been some 'rigor creep' around disaster recovery and security," Hoye says. "More and more companies are finding they have to compromise between what might be a best practice and what they can afford."

"A key dilemma for insurers is whether to be purely preventative, or whether to try to be proactive in security," Trembly says. "Preventative is throwing up firewalls, intrusion detection, everything we can. But there's a new paradigm out there in the security world in which individual companies are going after intruders to be proactive in deterring future attacks."

Budgets are also top of mind for IT professionals, Hoye says. "Affordability is key, with IT budgets continually under pressure. On one hand, bandwidth, CPU power, and storage capacity continue to get more plentiful and less expensive, so one would think it would translate to the bottom line in terms of IT spend. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. All of that efficiency and economy of scale that comes from advancement of technology gets almost instantly consumed by the appetites of insurance company management and driven by regulation."

Other topics of discussion could include cost management and talent acquisition. However, the exact agenda is unknown because the session's ultimate direction is set by the audience — and that's what makes the IT Town Hall unique.

 "This isn't a traditional panel presentation where the audience sits and listens," says Travers. "We talk about what everyone in the room wants to talk about. It's a chance for everyone to share ideas and experiences and for IT professionals to take away information they can immediately put to use in their own companies."