Insurers acknowledge that outmoded infrastructure is limiting business agility, a new study by Oracle Insurance and Insurance Networking News finds. The study, which queried 421 insurance C-level and senior executives, IT professionals and line-of-business managers, assessed the organizational priorities for insurers, their effectiveness in priority areas and the role that IT plays in helping and hindering their initiatives.
The ongoing challenge of modernizing legacy systems was apparent in the results, with 61% of respondents indicating that they could deliver more efficient and faster service if they were not limited by their current IT environment. Indeed, respondents, when rating their company’s effectiveness, scored their organizations lowest in areas that require significant agility, such as delivering new products to market, improving the efficiency of customer service, expanding and optimizing distribution channels and streamlining policy processing.
The numbers indicated that speed-to-market is a primary victim of legacy systems, with 31% of respondents saying they would introduce new products quarterly if technology limitations were not holding them back, and 23% indicating that annual releases would be their ideal. Conversely, aged technology seems to have the least impact on managing business risk, with 72% of respondents rating their organization as either very effective or highly effective in this area.
