Before BPM: Four Questions Carriers Should Ask

 Carriers implementing BPM strategies are bridging from the hard-coded world of today to an easily configurable world of tomorrow. And getting out of a legacy environment and into the world of thinking in configurable terms will always be a work in progress. “You need to be able to achieve change when it’s required,” says Donald Light, senior analyst with Boston-based Celent.  To successfully address these challenges, Light recommends insurers ask the following four questions:  1)      Do you have the staff resources necessary to deepen and extend use of BPM solutions beyond initial deployment?2)      Are you in the early days of replacing inflexible core legacy systems or well along in that process?3)      Is your primary need to make processes uniform and compliant within and across business units?4)      Is there a clear SOA roadmap in place or is the enterprise infrastructure just now being addressed? On the technology solution provider side, says Light, a BPM vendor must also conduct due diligence. Light recommends vendors begin the process by including the following four elements:1)      A strong set of functionality and tools that will facilitate carrier implementation of its SOA strategy.2)      An emphasis on ease of use. This is especially important for IT developers as they create the code and/or integration processes that their peers on the business side created.3)      Strong modeling, analytics, and optimization capabilities.4)      Include a set of insurance-specific features.