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Content Management: In Content Management Piecemail Fix Can Work

Ed McKinley April 2007

The insurance industry can't agree on a definition of the phrase "enterprise content management." Whatever it means, though, there's a consensus that it's improving.

Many think of it as combining absolutely every kind of documented information the company owns and putting it into a paperless electronic central repository that imposes business rules, manages distribution and affords virtually unlimited access. That master file would house everything from this morning's jpegs to digitized versions of yellowing old paper-and-ink policies.

Contrarians might ask how that differs from "document management." Some complain about hearing the two phrases used interchangeably.

Others, including Matthew Josefowicz, insurance practice manager for Boston-based Celent LLC, would even prefer to banish the phrase "content management" as too broad to be useful.

"Enterprise content management can mean almost anything," Josefowicz says. "We tend not to use it."

Vendors can legitimately claim a role in enterprise content management with offerings as diverse as document automation; collaborative offering; document offering workflow; and imaging, archiving and retention, he says.

Celent prefers to limit the discussion to document management and goes so far as to break that down into two components: document automation, which is the production of documents, and document handling, which is the intake, indexing and archiving of documents and would include imaging, says Josefowicz.

No matter how one views content management or document management, storage costs are decreasing, while improvements are coming to database search tools, and to indexing and character recognition tools, says Josefowicz. Meanwhile, XML is making it easier to produce documents in multiple formats while retaining their logical formatting, he says. At the same time end-to-end coverage, the automation of an entire enterprise, is coming closer to reality, and commercial software is helping conglomerations of legacy systems communicate better, he says.

Still, no vendor has come up with a software layer that carriers can plug in and use to bring harmony to all of the systems that a company's various departments have accumulated in the last few years, says Jeff Lopato, e-business manager for commercial lines at Preferred Mutual Insurance Co., New Berlin, N.Y. Each company simply has too many differing business practices, he says.

That leaves insurers with the task of creating their own software to link legacy systems, says Lopato. It can be done, he says, noting that Preferred Mutual reached a state that the company considers paperless about a year ago. For most carriers, anything other than a homegrown system would simply cost too much because millions of dollars have already been invested in automating departments one-at-a-time, he notes.

Indeed, Josefowicz says he considers the switching costs to a large-scale system a "high hurdle" and advises carriers to look around the company to see what automating tools already in place could be used in more departments around the company-pretty much what Preferred Mutual did.

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