With millions sold in the first couple of months, the Apple iPad has to be considered one of the most successful consumer electronics launches of all time. So far, its impact on business has mostly been discussed in terms of supporting iPad-using consumers, but recent conversations at industry conferences and with insurer CIOs have led me to believe there may be an impact on insurer's internal business capabilities in the near future.
At first glance, the iPad is neither fish nor fowl. Too big to be a phone, too small to be a "real computer," it doesn't fulfill an existing need. On a panel at the recent IASA conference, the CIO of Aflac discussed a conversation with his teenage daughter in which she was underwhelmed by the iPad as a replacement for any of the devices (phone, iPod, laptop) that she currently relied upon, and dismissed it as one more thing to carry.
But the iPad (by which I mean to include both the Apple machine and the inevitable comparable alternatives from other providers) represents a new kind of communications device, which has two major advantages over current platforms. The first is as a platform for field data capture, and the second is as what I've been calling the "shareable small screen." Both of these have specific value to the insurance industry.
Unlike a laptop or a phone, an iPad is a good platform for entering short pieces of data or selecting from menus in an interactive form from the field. The screen real estate and text-input option is superior to both a smartphone and a stylus-based tablet, and it doesn't require resting on a surface like a laptop. Once the camera-enabled versions emerge, both still and video image capture will enable field personnel to incorporate rich data into these forms, including audio signatures from customers or claimants validating information.
In addition, as the first example of a true "shareable small screen," the iPad is uniquely suited to social engagement with displayed information. It is designed so small groups of people can easily view the screen together either sitting next to each other or passing the device back and forth as easily as a piece of paper.
This communal experience may hold the key to "kitchen table problem" that has bedeviled insurers' field technology strategies for the last decade and a half. While it has been possible to put interactive applications on agents' laptops, many agents have resisted these because the laptop is not natural to the intimate selling environment of most insurance sales. Putting up a screen that only the agent can see is less conducive to building a relationship than working together on a paper application.
But the iPad could change this. Not only does it enable the agent and client to work together, it offers the potential to create truly engaging interactive applications that make the insurance-buying process less intimidating than a paper form does, with its bureaucratic language and tiny type.
Some tech pundits, notably Seth Godin, also have proposed the iPad as a tool for internal business meetings. Rather than sitting in front of projected powerpoint slides, each attendee might have them displayed on his iPad with an option to annotate and push annotations to the group or private comments to the presenter without leaving his seat. I can also attest to the value of a single iPad to display slides in a small meeting. And unlike a laptop, the single window of an iPad discourages multitasking during meetings.
While some of the insurer CIOs I've spoken to about this recently are interested in these capabilities, others are interested in the iPad as a step back toward network computing with its benefits in control and access management. Providing a virtual desktop on a powerful laptop machine seems, in some ways, less logical than displaying a virtual desktop on a locked-down device. With the iPad's closed nature, many security and desktop maintenance issues related to supporting laptops may go away. One CIO envisioned a future in which his company gets out of the hardware support business entirely, and just provides a secure virtual desktop employees can access from any device they already own.
And one CIO at the ACORD/LOMA conference in May raised an issue I hadn't thought of in relation to what's considered (in the consumer world) a premium-priced item: cost. "If I can replace a $1,500 laptop with a $500 iPad, I'm interested." While the same argument would apply to commodity netbooks, such machines feel to the users like a step down from their laptops. The iPad, with its unique features, feels like a step up.
While it's certainly too early to tell what kind of impact pad-based communications will have on the insurance industry, insurers should start to consider potential uses for this uniquely positioned new tool. INN
Matthew Josefowicz is the director of the insurance practice at Novarica. This article was adapted from an upcoming report on the impact of changes in consumer technology on the insurance industry. He can be reached directly at mj@novarica.com.
