Insure Think

Can a tech startup digitally assemble the pieces of a comprehensive, employer-provided health plan?

As the insurance industry moves into a more data-centric world, data governance becomes more critical for ensuring the data is consistent, reliable and usable for analysis.

Just days before this issue, which contains our security cover story, went to press, we got some interesting news: 1.2 billion unique usernames and passwords and 542 million email addresses were reportedly stolen from 420,000 websites, according to The New York Times. The websites ranged from Fortune 500 companies down to small online retailers.

Six questions that need to be asked before signing on with an outside service.

While better reporting and actuarial analysis help to support financial decisions, improved analytics and decision making greatly assist the rest of the organization.

Insurers’ annual strategic planning efforts can benefit from an infusion of tactical reality.

Allstate's director of technology and operations says disruptive innovation has the power to completely change industries — ours included.

As the Millennial generation comes of age, they will demand fundamental changes — and others as well — from life insurers.

Social networking and its elusive ROI gets folded into something bigger.

The value of IoT is in the data.

Deloitte research finds that financial services is the industry most targeted by cyber criminals.

IT leaders expect more money for cloud, virtualization and mobile — but no staff increases.

Every insurer needs to compete on products and information turned around in light-speed fashion.

Making the quantitative case is a long-practiced ritual in many insurance organizations.

The bottom line is that no one policy will cover all the exposures in the social media realm.

Sometime between 2008 and 2009, the number of devices online surpassed the number of people, giving rise to the Internet of Things (IoT), an ever-expanding ecosystem of smart devices that use wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) technology to communicate with each other and with business systems.

What does it take to virtualize all the key components in your data center?

The Financial Conduct Authority is demanding higher standards of consumer protection from insurers, which could lead to greater customer engagement and understanding.

Are heartland-based insurers at a recruiting disadvantage for tech skills?

A unified, comprehensive platform can help underwriters perform their jobs more efficiently — and profitably.

Today's data centers are doing far more with much smaller footprints.

Managers can benefit from applying this theory both to their career aspirations as well as to interactions and expectations of staff.

Time will tell if the Halbig decision remains viable. But in the meantime, a new level of uncertainty has been injected into the process.

Insurers will be competing with other industries for both legacy and “new IT" talent.

PolicyWriter, by Adaptik Corp., is like no other P&C policy administration solution on the market – and we’re happy to prove it. Today’s Adaptik Blog entry highlights the software’s innovative data and rule alignment .

Continually building trust and credibility in the data is the key to a successful data warehouse.

Three recent HR moves demonstrate that large life insurers recognize customer experience as a strategic differentiator.

Insurers actually have more data analytics resources than other industries.

Today's data centers are doing far more with much smaller footprints.

Examining the administrative burden of doing business with the E&S market.

Insurers should be in the business of making life safer and better for consumers all the time.

There is a role for both types of CIO, each organization has different priorities whether they’re an insurer, intermediary, vendor, start-up, etc.

The Evolution of Insurance – The Friendly Society Evolves Sanjay Mohan describes the evolution of Insurance and how Insurance has always been about a "community" of customers. This blog highlights today’s market need for carriers to rediscover the consumer.

Insurers can learn from the use of activity tracking in other fields to help their customers make better decisions.

Last week, we discussed the reality that most IT organizations are making well-intentioned investments, but that their investment portfolio may be out of balance. To read last week’s blog,click here.

What are the mobile leaders, including Allstate, Progressive, State Farm and Geico, doing to go from standard to strong?

Building, acquiring or even renting an international network is increasingly becoming a must-have for any underwriting business attracted to customers beyond the small-and-medium-enterprise and mid-market audience.

Will the digital giants also become insurance giants?

Eighty percent of health plan data is unstructured. Text mining can transform it into a format open to analysis.

The abundance of technology choices consumers have has triggered a shift in expectations.

There is an inevitable rethink – again – about social media metrics.

Insurers’ recent partnerships indicates a faster move to digital. What’s next?

Sam Medina begins a 3-part series on Transforming the IT Investment Budget in order to fund new programs and initiatives without the necessity of additional capital expense.

Mobile opens up new avenues of interaction with customers, as well as adding a new dimension to internal operations.

When prices are relatively the same, the differentiator is now customer experience.

This growing combination of real-time data collection from remote sources, wireless connectivity and analytics could affect virtually every aspect of insurance.

Sam Medina describes the wealth of data that should be gleaned from Legacy systems in order to build organizational knowledge back into modern systems during transformation.

PolicyWriter, by Adaptik Corp., is like no other P&C policy administration solution on the market – and we’re happy to prove it. Today’s Adaptik Blog entry highlights the software’s rule management capabilities.

Insurers reveal what technology initiatives are on their horizons and what technological challenges keep them up at night.

Assigning yourself the “chief encouragement officer” title and breaking out of ineffective interpersonal communication patterns may be just the first step required to lead today’s diverse insurance IT workforce.

What IT leaders can do to mix it up with the rest of the business.

While it sounds like a marketing buzzword, data lakes offer an alternative to enterprise data warehouses.