Insure Think

A safe new-year prediction is that we shall see more insurers getting into trouble, paying the price for over-expansion.

Competitive advantage comes from being able to answer any question at any time.

One out of four cloud vendors may not be around a year from now. Will your data be there?

Through its acquisition of Nest, Google soon will have access to even more personal data, positioning it to potentially enter the homeowners’ insurance market.

No matter who you are or what your role is in your organization, you should leverage the power of your thoughts. Thoughts are inception points and transformational thoughts can spark real change in your organization. The power of your thoughts can result in great ideas and can inspire and move others toward collaboration, innovation, and creating the future. It can transform your work, your organization, your company, and even an entire industry.

The best insurers will achieve competitive advantage by developing the judgment and decision-making capabilities of their knowledge workers.

Enough talk about cloud and big data analytics — insurers want to see execution.

Since last year, new skills and new thinking are more urgent than ever, even as budgets and technology needs remain static.

Insurers strongly support flood reform, but it needs to be implemented in a fashion that doesn’t destroy flood-affected communities.

By knowing where there may be gaps in coverage, you can help to mitigate or potentially eliminate future claims.

For P&C companies, cloud and analytics will define success in the year ahead, says Ernst & Young. But is that all there is?

Insurers need to think not just about how customers want to buy a product, but the total lifetime experience.

The year 2014 is expected to be something of a tipping point for established and new technologies to take hold in the insurance industry.

Changes for distributors of insurance products may be coming in 2014.

Let's face it, big data is dumb.

Tort and liability issues will flash a yellow go-slow light for driverless cars for years, but will not shut down the road altogether.

The vendor that once ruled the world opened up computing to the rest of us.

Insurers can learn from the development troubles of the recently launched HealthCare.gov.

Data centers are changing right in front of our eyes, but who's going to make those changes?

Understanding these areas of concern can help you avoid and manage the potential risks inherent to IT projects.

Marketing and IT people actually stand on common ground, looking to support customer data and interactions.

Insurers that invest in building innovation as a corporate capability will be positioned to react to disruptive threats.

Industry associations and experts had a lot to say about the FIO report, even though there wasn’t much new information in it.

Insurers have always been at the forefront of in-house training and development, but will this carry over to tech and big data skills?

Focusing on the lack of testing makes for snappy headlines. More importantly, though, it's an indication of systemic failures in the development process.

A Swiss initiative is helping to develop women leaders.

With these elements in place, your chances of delivering on the promise of innovation are significantly increased.

How technology innovations allow brokers and carriers to do business more easily and effectively.

Lessons in agile development and data security were reinforced; mobile and cloud became as commonplace as telephones.

How to manage convergence in a global technology environment.

Tablet computers are becoming standard client computers, but there's still work to be done on the back end.

Vendor marketing tactics have escalated to a whole new level of insanity.

Microinsurance is a foothold to an underserved, untapped and fragmented market under the present business model.

Coming to an insurance business near you: predictive analytics.

Breakdowns in financial controls can be disastrous for insurers.

It’s time for insurers of all types to hop on the big data bandwagon or risk getting left behind.

At least 75 percent of CIOs in a recent survey report having a clear understanding of what their businesses need in terms of innovation — now companies need them to be able to act on that understanding.

At least 15 major insurers have dedicated Twitter accounts, including USAA, GEICO, Progressive, Allstate, Mutual of Omaha and Travelers.

Insurers understand enterprise risk more than anyone else, and that understanding should apply to their own IT operations as well.

While we can differentiate our service and products in many ways, data can still be standardized, sent, received and consumed in our respective systems without the need for re-keying.

New figures state that 59 percent of the Fortune 500 still have at least 1.6 hours of data center downtime per week, which translates to at least $8.5 million per year in losses.

Honest feedback from direct reports on managerial performance can be hard to get. But once it happens, it's like striking gold in more ways than one would think.

While most new capabilities employed by life insurers today are around mobility, focusing on better graphics and greater integration into the overall sales process, distribution innovation has been stifled.

Singapore now hosts a vibrant maturing reinsurance market with depth in expertise, capacity and reach.

A recent interview of two IT leaders from Nationwide makes it clear that insurers, which need to speed up product delivery, are particularly good candidates for DevOps.

The latest mile marker on the road to commoditization is being tested in supermarkets, malls, gas stations and auto dealerships.

A nasty new "ransomware" virus is reminding corporations that you can't educate users enough when it comes to IT security.

All too often companies end up with multiple people trying to solve components of the same problem, each with a different perspective on the relationships between the variables and what the problem really is.

It's easy to assume millennials always prefer digital channels for transactions, but such generalities don't always hold true.

There are several generational, technological distinctions that could drastically affect how your data operations are run in the future.

New technologies are creating new exposures to complex risks for agents and brokers.

Simple is better than complex is one of the primary lessons to be learned from the Obamacare website meltdown.