Insurers Can Use Metadata Standards For Internal Data
Insurance Networking News, March 2007
"If it has already been invented in the industry, why should we think that we're going to be able to invent our own that's better?" reasons Rich Maynard, an enterprise architect for The Hartford Financial Services Group, Hartford, Conn. He's one of many insurance executives who view industry metadata standards that way.
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"If I were the CIO, I'd say start with ACORD," Knoble says, referring to a widely used set of industry standards. "If they don't satisfy a need, then modify them." Observers agree that data and business processes vary so much among insurers that standards nearly always need some tweaking to work internally.
In a pilot project, ACORD standards fit 90% of the data at Erie Indemnity Co., Erie, Pa., says Jim Viveralli, a database administrator there. "The rest of them, we had to make up because they're Erie-specific," he says. His service on ACORD's Business Dictionary Validation Working Group helps him keep him in touch with others who are working with metadata, he notes.
That sort of contact can help carriers navigate the metadata scene but can't replace the need for familiarity with company metadata, says Mike Freel, a bureau statistics manager for EMC Insurance Group Inc., Des Moines, Iowa.
"We remain cognizant of all of these industry standards, yet we make sure that if the need arises for us to have our own internal standard because of specific business practices then we would do that [internally]," says Freel.
Juggling external standards and internal needs can prove challenging because most carriers face a "mishmash" of half-forgotten homegrown legacy metadata standards, says Knoble. Departments within a single company often use different names for the same pieces of data or use differing rules for processing the same data. Data from outside the company hasn't been subject to company rules.
"You may be using data that's in a six-digit field in one place and in a 10-digit field in another," Knoble says by way of example. "In one instance it has a decimal point-in another it does not. Dates may be in different formats." Drivers might be listed by age in one place and by date of birth in another.
One part of the company may say a claim file is closed when the final payment is made, while another may consider the claim closed when the last bit of activity ceases, notes Freel of EMC. Departments can have trouble agreeing on something as simple as a policy number, according to Maynard of The Hartford.
With separate entities within a company generating their own business and technical terms, one carrier found itself with 3,500 terms to standardize and define, a source at the company says.
Meanwhile, the volume of data that insurance companies process is growing rapidly. "The typical large insurance company is getting data from an unbelievable number of sources," says Knoble.
"There's a great, great dependency now on using third-party or external data sources for business use within a company or in the industry across companies," says Pete Marotta, enterprise data administrator and principle in charge of data management consulting for ISO, the Insurance Services Office, Jersey City, N.J.
Maynard notes that some third-party data sources have been supplying information for a long time, like motor vehicle bureaus, while many others have arisen in recent years, like catastrophe modelers.
"Not too many years ago the notion of longitude and latitude and geocoding were not thought about a lot," says Maynard. "The distance to the shore when underwriting a house for wind damage used to be a fine art." Now, insurers rely on a dramatically larger well of third-party information on geography and weather, he says.
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