Mission Accomplished: Four Lessons from IASA

The technology conference season for 2012 is officially over. In the last four weeks IT leaders and software solution providers—and a few folks like me—spent about eight days together hashing over old problems and speculating about the future.

I started at the IASA conference hoping that when it was all over I could tell you that I learned four things. I'm not sure I accomplished that; it seems, though, that I was able to reinforce some beliefs, which is a way of learning as well.

First, I learned that innovation really is a relative term. As Great American Insurance CIO Piyush Singh told a crowd at the CIO roundtable, young people don't call advancements in communication or information “technology” just as previous generations didn't refer to “radio technology” or “TV technology.”

Insurers are often looked at as laggards in the world of innovation, but as SMA partner Karen Furtado told the IT Town Hall, innovation can also mean taking existing tools and repurposing them. Analytics tools have been around for a while, but now insurers can predict how things can happen.

There remain a great many unknowns, though. An unidentified person got up at the CIO Roundtable and said, “I really don't know how anyone could have predicted that Hurricane Ike (in 2008) could have caused $6 billion damage in Ohio.” A point well taken, but now a part of history, never to be forgotten by actuaries.

Speaking of analysts, there are people concerned about where the future IT leaders are going to come from. The IASA awards scholarships to college students who are majoring in areas that will lead to insurance careers. Since IASA has such a strong technology base, it would be nice if at least one of the nine scholarship winners this year was majoring in a technology field, but as Furtado—a member of the scholarship committee—pointed out that as much as the committee wanted to find some worthy IT students, it ultimately was unsuccessful.

The solution? There are people in the business world who have undiscovered skills that can be used to become productive IT leaders and there are ways to discover those hidden talents. Creative people are out there and they can be discovered. Insurers just need to look for them.

The third thing I learned is that cloud technology is going to be an eye-opener for small and mid-tier insurance carriers who need to find a way to compete with their larger competitors. The next big move could come in the area of policy administration, long thought to be too big or too complicated to be taken to the cloud.

At least one vendor has announced that it's policy suite is in the cloud and several vendors—both at IASA and ACORD LOMA—are getting there.

Imagine getting a URL and starting to write policies in the cloud? It sounds scary—and not as easy as I made it sound—but the investment in a cloud-based system can save an insurer millions of dollars that can be spent to find new business.

Finally, I learned that insurers face difficult choices in virtually every technology decision they make and that the options aren't always good ones. Bob Skrzypinski, a consultant on a panel I moderated, explained that in legacy modernization projects, insurers face three options—good, fast or cheap—and can only achieve two of them.

I certainly hope everyone opts for “good” as one of their two. Fast or cheap involve difficult decisions and much depends on an individual carrier's situation.

Decisions like those are gut-wrenching, but leaders in this industry make them every day without knowing for months if their choice was the correct one. Sometimes, things are learned the hard way, but the challenge to get things right is inspiring.