Building the Insurance Company of the Future

New Forrester report profiles emerging technology vendors that insurers should watch.

Insurance Networking News, October 26, 2011

Bill Kenealy

As the lingering soft market, spate of natural disasters, shifting demographics and regulatory upheaval assert immediate pressure on the insurance industry, it would be easy to discount the extent to which technological change is buffeting the industry. Yet the enterprise architects at insurance companies do not have that luxury.

A new report from Forrester examines some technology-forward vendors that can help insurers build a technology foundation to compete in a rapidly changing industry. Authored by Senior Analyst Ellen Carney, the report also counsels enterprise architects to embrace business capability maps to help make sure the relatively static "whats" of the insurance industry (paying claims, underwriting) reconcile with the dynamic "hows." "Business capability maps provide enterprise architects with a set of solutions that are either new or in place," the report states.

So what are architects building toward? Carney foresees big data playing a big part in the future of insurance. She tells Insurance Networking News that carriers know what they’re supposed to be doing with big data but few currently have the data science resources/roles to do anything with it. "I know a lot of the big carriers are trying to build out the big data science skills and I even have talked with a smaller regional carrier in the SE that’s building a data science team," she says.

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