Analytics

Chicago — Aon eSolutions Group, a unit of Aon Corp., announced that 18-year insurance technology veteran Paul Holden has joined Aon eSolutions as CIO.

Accuracy and visibility are vital in maintaining a motivated sales force and rolling out new products.

Agencies that have not begun to embrace enterprise content management and workflow may have already missed the boat.

A routine, "fit-for-purpose" data assessment helps carriers plan wisely.

Thanks to new technologies, carriers are unearthing fraud such as "rent-a-patient" schemes and physician upcoding.

You can't hop into a cab, step into an elevator or walk down the street without passing someone using a Blackberry, iPhone or other type of mobile device. Business professionals, students, police and even your kids are connected every second of the day. As a result, more and more carriers are recognizing the inherent value of mobile technologies as a productivity tool, and have embraced this technology.

Viewed from afar, the claims process has not changed markedly in many decades. Despite new technologies being leveraged in many aspects of claims, for too many insurers, the claims process as a whole remains a manually intensive, inefficient business process-one in which even experienced adjusters find themselves mired in paperwork.

Analytics isn't a new concept, but considering the way insurers now use it, it may as well be. Where once fraud was the issue to enter insurers' minds when they heard the term analytics, they have now found more ways to use this technology. One approach is to employ text analytics, which often uses natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, to convert unstructured data into valuable, structured data.

Dayton, Ohio — Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. has been recognized for its innovative use of technology across and beyond the business to create and sustain highly significant and quantifiable business value, according to DM Review magazine and the Teradata Corp., division of NCR, a Dayton, Ohio, data warehousing and business intelligence technology provider.

Fairfax, Va. — The National Association of Independent Life Brokerage Agencies (NAILBA) announced the appointment of Thomas A. Kirke to the 2008 Executive Committee. Effective Jan. 1, 2008, the NAILBA Executive Committee will be filled as follows: