6 Ways to Optimize BI Investments
Published September 12, 2012 3:17 PM
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Updated September 13, 2012 1:31 PM
1 Min Read
Insurers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on business intelligence over the past 10 years. However, carrier information remains disjointed, conflicting, slow and backwards-looking. Frequently, the report outputs from the old systems were simply migrated to new systems. Having moved from data gathering to data reporting, executives and managers now receive either too much or too little information, but not actionable insights on customers. While increasing data accuracy is an important milestone, the goal is to enable more efficient and profitable operations. To achieve the desired ROI from BI investments, insurers must provide the right information to leaders in a timely manner and in a format that helps them analyze, evaluate and react to changing market conditions. This means infusing governance, monitoring and compliance throughout the managed data life cycle. It also means having well-designed reporting outputs that offer holistic views of data with appropriate drill-down and intelligence. Through six actions, both life and P&C insurers can gain more insight and value from their BI investments.
1. Establish a core set of data most relevant to the entire enterprise.
Prioritize and establish a core set of data required for the BI solutions. This will provide direction for data-remediation activities and provide a focus for implementing end-to-end data management solutions. End-to-end data management solutions include the tools and governance to ensure that the enterprise is consistently producing high-quality and conformed data to set standards for ongoing analysis and consumption.
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2. Establish core governance to manage values and definitions.
The right governance, with common language and terms, provides for data integrity and insights. Controlled data management goes beyond just governance, however. It includes the ongoing evaluation and management of critical data to ensure that governed information remains of the highest quality and is aligned to consistently conformed standards.
3. Start controlled clean-up efforts.
While insurers are often data rich, they also have a lot of data quality issues. Instituting data management solutions for improving ongoing quality is essential, but there should be some clean-up of existing and historical data. For example, a clean-up effort to improve customer data and, perhaps, years of customer history, could be very valuable.
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4. Rapidly develop tools for business use.
Analytics-based tools can help insurers more easily conduct data analysis and mining to identify metrics, trends, interrelationships and anomalies. Internet-enabled scorecards, dashboards, reporting and interactive analytics tools are being incorporated into many insurance processes, such as the front office, claims or customer relationship management. Advanced tools that can analyze both structured and unstructured data in real time help insurers better predict behavior and take action ahead of an incident, such as in the detection and identification of insurance fraud.
5. Embed intelligence into reports.
Rather than simply displaying information, reports must highlight areas that need executive attention. This requires insurers first determine how they will use information to improve their business performance. Insurers will also need to establish parameters to identify issues and trends, employ intelligent graphics for multi-dimensional analysis and train managers to interpret the reports to determine the right responses to these insights.
6. Build solutions that offer broad and granular insight.
Insurance executives need to be able to look at the enterprise-level picture and then drill down to lower tiers of granularity as needed. BIs value is that it highlights issues that need attention and offers the ability to then drill down to understand and resolve the issues.