Insurance CIOs Encouraged to Rethink the "Vision Thing"

While our 41^st president famously intoned that he didn’t get the “vision thing,” insurance IT operations may well profit from having an overarching vision to guide them.

A new report from Boston-based Celent, “Visions and Re-Visions for Insurance Technology,” explores the benefits of having a vision to govern decisions about organizational structure, resources, and application portfolio composition. Yet, the report, authored by Celent senior analyst Donald Light, makes clear that an IT vision is separate from IT strategy and IT mission.

“Mission is different from vision, in part because it gives you a direction to follow,” Light tells Insurance Networking News. “Mission gives you inspiration and the ability to get buy-in.”

Light dives deeper into the distinction in the report. “A good IT vision should be attractive, short, directional, practical, and qualitative,” he writes. “An IT vision is not the same thing as an IT strategy, although it should certainly influence and shape some or many elements of an insurer’s IT strategy. Having an IT vision does matter, if it discernibly contributes to better IT decisions, processes, and deliverables.”

Indeed, Light says when it comes to IT vision, the point is the journey, not the result.

“By its nature, IT group visions do not represent empirical or quantifiable goals,” he writes. “But over a period of several years, having a vision gives a CIO and IT group the ability to ask: “Are we appreciably closer to our vision than we were two, or three, or five years ago?”