With the increasing use of social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and wikis among individuals in their personal lives, organizations are beginning to look for ways to incorporate similar tools within their own businesses. For insurers, which depend on complex processes of multiple individuals exchanging and interacting information, enterprise collaboration represents a huge potential set of efficiencies and opportunities for rethinking core processes. We are currently at a very early stage of adoption. However, things are changing rapidly, and real impacts are starting to be felt.
Enterprise collaboration is an umbrella term that covers the usage of social media technologies and practices inside of an organization (as opposed to non-organizational social networks).
Users of social media generate content, including video; collaboratively create and edit documents; and engage in peer-to-peer discussion through instant messaging, traditional blogging, micro-blogging (i.e. status updates) and wiki-authoring.
As interpersonal communication is moving more toward these channels, organizational communication also is moving from complete reliance on face-to-face meetings, traditional e-mail and the exchange of documents to embrace these additional channels.
Insurers are incorporating enterprise collaboration technologies into their operating models to improve process efficiency and knowledge sharing. They are currently employing a range of enterprise collaboration technologies with varying stages of maturity. Microsoft's Sharepoint is by far the most common platform, and instant messaging, Facebook and Wikis also are widespread.
Interestingly, enterprise collaboration maturity is not directly correlated to company size. Many larger carriers are in the infancy stage of enterprise collaboration, while some small and midsize carriers are already using instant messaging and Sharepoint-based document collaboration tools.
The use of enterprise collaborative tools presents a new set of challenges to organizations that are not used to managing this type of information and interaction. Carriers are faced with new decisions, among them:
* Monitoring issues to ensure that inappropriate content is not shared or archived
* Making sure that new toolsets are integrated into existing workflow, communication and archiving systems
* Cultural changes, including teaching staff that have always used private communication channels for internal collaboration to move more discussions to semi-public internal platforms
* The need for metrics to measure whether these new tools are actually benefiting the organization
Of these, cultural adoption issues are often the most difficult. It is one thing to provide the tool set for enterprise collaboration, it's another to manage the changes in behavior required to benefit from them. Staff members who have grown used to working in one way often can find it challenging to change methods.
Another challenge inherent to deploying enterprise collaboration appears to be a lack of metrics. It's difficult for carriers to measure the success of these initiatives and provide any type of justification or ROI information. The most common metrics insurers use are usage rates, employee feedback, and operational or financial improvements, which requires being able to attribute improvements to the use of enterprise collaboration.
While questions of how to incorporate these new tools into an organization grow, so do the number of vendors offering solutions. Enterprise collaboration offerings are provided by four different types of vendors.
* Pure-play Vendors: Vendors such as Yammer, Jive Software, Atlassian Confluence, SocialText, etc., provide social software on a pay-per-use model as well as in-house installation model. In addition to these prominent providers, there are literally hundreds of other players in this active and still-immature market.
* Technology Giants: As noted, the leading platform for enterprise collaboration among insurers is Microsoft Sharepoint. IBM's LotusLive is also used in some prominent examples.
* Horizontal Product Vendors: Various CRM, ERP, ECM and BPM vendors have started to incorporate enterprise collaboration capabilities within their products to provide better and more social experiences to their customers.
* Insurance Core Systems: Some core systems, such as claims systems and rating engines, are starting to incorporate enterprise collaboration capabilities within their narrow areas.
While enterprise collaboration is gaining popularity in organizations, insurers still face questions about the best ways to incorporate it and articulate its value. They should consider how the capabilities provided by technologies will affect their processes and organizational design. Depending on the situation, enterprise collaboration has the potential to fit into, accelerate, transform or even make redundant any of an insurer's current processes.
