Brookfield, Wis. - Fiserv Customer Centered Solutions (CCS), the customer relationship management (CRM) arm of Fiserv, launched its Enterprise Relationship Management Suite (ERM Suite), an integrated product line designed to address service and sales issues facing CEOs.

Sarasota, Fla.- Kirk A. Sexton will take the reins as chief information officer of Unisource Administrators Inc., a workers' compensation third-party administrator that provides workers' compensation products, claim management, managed care and payroll services, to more than 15,000 employers in the southeastern United States.

Peoria, Ill.- RLI, a property and casualty carrier and provider of surety bonds to niche or underserved markets, established a strategic information services department to manage and develop RLI's strategic and management information services. The newly formed department's goal will be to create accurate and consistent information that can be efficiently delivered to RLI managers and executives to enable them to react to potential problems and opportunities.The new business unit "will be essential in managing our growth and achieving greater profitability," says RLI President & COO Michael J. Stone.

Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. Novato, Calif., has taken a third major step in its total IT transformation by awarding IBM a ten-year $94 million contract to modernize a major portion of the property/casualty insurer's application, development and maintenance software into an On Demand infrastructure that could reduce the number of major applications by 70 percent while improving customer service. When completed, the work could save Fireman's Fund $200 million, more than double the project's actual cost.With IBM's assistance, Fireman's Fund will shift its IT operations to an Internet-based computing model known as a "service-oriented architecture" (SOA) that enables consolidation of costly, redundant applications. Under Fireman's Fund direction, IBM will sift through mission-critical applications using a unique IBM Business Consulting process called Component Business Modeling to determine which applications deliver the most value to the business and which processes can be refined, consolidated or eliminated.

The Lawson Firm, a Cleveland-based law firm providing legal services to the insurance industry, is offering a two-part paper examining the business and legal risks associated with business-process outsourcing (BPO) and the strategies used to manage those risks. The paper is in response to recent studies showing that roughly half of all insurers currently outsource one or more business processes, or are planning to do so within the next 18 months.

Industry experts often criticize insurers as being "laggards" in adopting new technologies. But carriers are leading most other industries when it comes to adopting scanning and imaging technologies, a new study concludes.For example, 86% of insurers surveyed by AIIM, an enterprise content management association based in Silver Spring, Md., are using scanned documents and images to answer inquiries from customers, compared with 73% of companies across all industries. Furthermore, 60% of carriers use scanned documents to respond to litigation, compared with 45% of all survey respondents.

For insurance carriers, brokers and agencies, the ability to recover quickly from a systems outage or disaster is critical to their business-and, increasingly, may be mandated by law or industry oversight groups. As a result, business continuity has become a core management issue, whereas in the past it was an issue that was addressed by IT executives."The insurance industry is moving from recoverability toward resilience," says Ted DeZabala, national leader of Deloitte & Touche LLP's security services team. "This is a huge change of mentality, of management, and of technology for the insurance industry."

As an undergraduate at MIT and New York University, Dennis Callahan majored in mathematics. So, it's not so surprising that the CIO of Guardian Life Insurance Company of America has been so successful at focusing on the numbers at the New York-based insurance company.Since he took the CIO position in late 2000, Callahan has reduced the IT budget at Guardian by one-third-all while modernizing the entire corporate infrastructure.

When John Golden took control of IT at CNA Financial Corp. in late 2001, he faced the same challenges many CIOs are still grappling with: How do you transform diverse legacy systems into a modern platform that enables faster product development, better customer service, higher productivity and greater operational efficiency?After consolidating 20 IT groups into one, and focusing on the business value and total cost of ownership of IT systems and applications, Golden, in only a few years, has reduced the Chicago-based carrier's nondiscretionary IT expenses from $400 million per year to $200 million.

If it weren't for a bad case of writer's block, Michael Bernaski might be a famous novelist right now. Instead, he's the CIO and senior vice president of property-casualty e-business and technology at The Hartford Financial Services Inc.Last year, he accepted the senior technology position at the Hartford, Conn.-based financial services firm when he "hit the wall" trying to write a murder mystery during a year-long sabbatical from the consulting world. Bernaski had left Accenture, where he had worked for 15 years, to enjoy his newborn daughter and pen his way toward the best-seller's list.

U.S. property/casualty insurers are expected to pay homeowners and businesses an estimated $2.1 billion for insured property-loss claims from eight catastrophes in the first quarter, according to preliminary estimates by ISO's Property Claim Services (PCS) unit.

RLI Corp. a Peroia, Ill.-based provider of property/casualty insurance and surety bonds that targets underserved markets, has established a strategic information services department to manage and develop RLI's strategic and management information services. The company has also named Iqbal "Q" Shariff to serve as vice president of the new department.

McCamish Systems L.L.C., an Atlanta-based BPO service provider to the life and annuity market, is now offering a broad range of agent management services on a business process outsourcing model (BPO). Previously, the company offered this service only to its life insurance and annuity policy administration clients, but it now offers these same services on a standalone basis.

MISSOULA, Mont.--RemoteScan Corporation, the makers of network connectivity software for document scanners and digital cameras, today announced the release of RemoteScan for Insurance Agents.

SIMSBURY, Conn. - The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc. and Protective Life Corporation, through wholly owned subsidiaries, have formed Life Alliance, LLC, a new online joint venture to help broker-dealers, banks and other distributors meet their customers' term life insurance needs.

MUMBAI, India - Teradata, a division of NCR Corp., announced today that it is providing data warehousing solutions to Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India. Called the Corporate Active Data Warehouse (CADW), the 60-terabyte solution, implemented in 2004, is the largest data warehouse project of its kind in India. The CADW will cater to business volumes larger than 160 million insurance policies of 130 million policyholders with large volumes of cash transactions per day.With more than 24.5 million policies sold every year, LIC is one of the largest life insurance companies in the world. The Teradata Warehouse will enable LIC to understand various usage profiles of the customers and policies in order to customize offerings and bundles and effectively manage them.

STAMFORD, Conn.--The Tillinghast business of Towers Perrin recently unveiled two new software applications to help insurers prepare for impending capital standards for variable annuity products.

London--New research by independent market analysts Datamonitor, and leading outsourcing advisory firm Everest Group has found that the average deal size in the $600bn global IT and BPO services sector is shrinking. Based on figures from Datamonitor's "IT Services Contracts Tracker," the average size of contracts announced by IT and BPO services vendors in the first quarter of 2005 fell 18% to $68.9m compared to the year ago period. This means that average deal size has now declined for three consecutive quarters.

After flirting with test pilots, phased rollouts and other levels of adoption, the jury is still out on whether mobile computing will become as ubiquitous to insurers as pen and paper.With claims management activities providing the most compelling impetus for adoption, a select group of insurers have sworn by the capabilities of mobile computing technologies to improve workflow and customer service. But other insurers continue to wait for greater application functionality, dependability and scalability before they commit to adopting the technology.

Insurers' growth strategies largely are based on their ability to sell more policies; competitive pricing, quicker time to market, effective marketing and new product development are common tactics to achieve that goal.For carriers like Fireman's Fund Insurance Co. that rely on a network of independent agencies, there's the added dimension of improving agent loyalty: Agents are known to steer their business to insurers that are easiest to work with. That's why the Novato, Calif.-based carrier in 2004 implemented a multi-year plan, dubbed Enterprise Partner Integration Program, which is the centerpiece of Fireman's desire to align its IT infrastructure to support more than 3,000 agents working at 59 offices in 26 states.