Cover-All Blog

Being able to better organize and utilize the data within our organizations, as well as relevant data from other sources, is obviously a key competitive advantage.  Achieving this advantage, however, requires specific technology changes.

According to Aaron Herrmann, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Cover-All, insurers will typically roll out the needed technology changes in pieces.  "Insurers may have multiple policy systems or one system," he explains. "Getting rid of legacy systems usually means getting rid of one system at a time, but once you introduce the new system, for a period of time you no longer have a single source of truth, and that can be a problem."

The key to meeting this challenge, he continues, lies in normalizing existing data from both the new system, the legacy system, and all other enterprise solutions that contain data needed for key metrics, thus yielding that much needed single source of truth.  "A lot of insurance companies are in this position of having multiple policy or claims systems, which is why many larger insurers began building data warehouses in the first place.  However, the costs of creating useful data warehouse and BI projects in general have been financially out of reach for mid-tier and smaller insurers until just recently."

"If this data warehousing and normalizing work has not been done prior to any BI initiative, then it needs to be done first," he continues.  "Cover-All is one of the only BI vendors that gives clients all the BI functionality they need via a single-integrated platform, including everything from a data warehouse, data marts and multi-dimensional analytic cubes, to a simple self-service oriented user interface (UI) that makes data meaningful and accessible."

He adds that there are many vendors that provide robust visualization tools that create graphs and reports, but such products are usually designed for use by IT professionals, not by a CEO, CFO, or chief underwriting or chief claims officer, etc.-"and they are the consumers of this data.  The problem this creates is that the actual consumers of the data can't interrogate their own data without relying on IT, so BI solutions often don't gain acceptance by the business community" Herrmann notes.  "IT personnel will select the solution they are comfortable with.  Yet this should not be an IT decision; it should be a business decision since the business will be the daily users of the solution.

"From my perspective, not having a business-user-friendly BI tool is very much like a pilot who flies a jumbo jet that has dials that show what the plane passed over three to six months earlier-which means they can only rely on what they see in front of them," states Herrmann.

Relevant offerings from Cover-All include an out-of-the-box BI solution and a BI Acceleration Kit.  More information is available at http://www.cover-all.com/solutions/business-intelligence/.

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