Despite celebrating its one-year anniversary last week, the popular press is reporting the insurance industry at large still seems to be taking a “wait and see” position on large-scale implementation of Microsoft’s Vista.

Seattle - SOA Software, an Integrated SOA governance automation vendor, has joined Microsoft's Business Process Alliance. The Business Process Alliance will propel mainstream adoption of people-ready processes by offering customers a set of end-to-end solutions for automating business processes. SOA Software's Workbench and Service Manager products provide integrated SOA governance automation capabilities for Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and Internet Information Services (IIS).

Chicago — Aon eSolutions Group, a unit of Aon Corp., announced that 18-year insurance technology veteran Paul Holden has joined Aon eSolutions as CIO.

Accuracy and visibility are vital in maintaining a motivated sales force and rolling out new products.

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Agencies that have not begun to embrace enterprise content management and workflow may have already missed the boat.

A routine, "fit-for-purpose" data assessment helps carriers plan wisely.

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Thanks to new technologies, carriers are unearthing fraud such as "rent-a-patient" schemes and physician upcoding.

You can't hop into a cab, step into an elevator or walk down the street without passing someone using a Blackberry, iPhone or other type of mobile device. Business professionals, students, police and even your kids are connected every second of the day. As a result, more and more carriers are recognizing the inherent value of mobile technologies as a productivity tool, and have embraced this technology.

Viewed from afar, the claims process has not changed markedly in many decades. Despite new technologies being leveraged in many aspects of claims, for too many insurers, the claims process as a whole remains a manually intensive, inefficient business process-one in which even experienced adjusters find themselves mired in paperwork.

Analytics isn't a new concept, but considering the way insurers now use it, it may as well be. Where once fraud was the issue to enter insurers' minds when they heard the term analytics, they have now found more ways to use this technology. One approach is to employ text analytics, which often uses natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, to convert unstructured data into valuable, structured data.

Dayton, Ohio — Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. has been recognized for its innovative use of technology across and beyond the business to create and sustain highly significant and quantifiable business value, according to DM Review magazine and the Teradata Corp., division of NCR, a Dayton, Ohio, data warehousing and business intelligence technology provider.

In a new 68-page report entitled 'BPO Opportunities in the Property & Casualty Insurance Sector,' analyst John Willmott finds that P&C insurers perceive themselves to be in a mature and highly competitive industry where process cost reduction and continuous service improvement are viewed as far more important mechanisms for achieving improvements in competitive positioning than process innovation.

Fairfax, Va. — The National Association of Independent Life Brokerage Agencies (NAILBA) announced the appointment of Thomas A. Kirke to the 2008 Executive Committee. Effective Jan. 1, 2008, the NAILBA Executive Committee will be filled as follows:

Washington – An extension to the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) has passed the U.S. Senate. The measure was approved by unanimous consent. The original TRIA was passed in wake of 9/11 and is set to expire on December 31.

Philadelphia — CIGNA Corp. is expanding into the small-group healthcare market with the announcement of its intention to pay $1.5 billion in cash for Great-West Healthcare, a deal that is expected to close during the first half of 2008, subject to regulatory approval. The Philadelphia-based carrier, whose CIGNA HealthCare business is based in Bloomfield, Conn., said it plans to fund the deal through cash and debt, and that it will also inject approximately $400 million of capital into its subsidiaries to support the acquired business.