HEMIC was started as a competitive state funda market of last resort, but competing with other workers compensation writersbased on legislation passed in Hawaii in 1996; it started operations in 1997. During the organization phase, the president, Bob Dove, hired Dobbinsa 20-year insurance veteranto be vice president of underwriting services, and the job evolved into CIO. Dobbins hired Bob Long two years later, to be responsible for network operations.

One of Dobbinss first decisions was to choose Tropics Software Technologies (www.gotropics.com) for the companys policy processing system. When it contracted with Tropics in June 1997, the company had no offices yetno hardware, nothing. It went live on July 10, slightly more than a month later, and hasnt slowed down since. Its still using Tropics, and expanding with it.

HEMIC writes workers compensation only, and only in Hawaii. Its currently writing $32 million of premiumroughly 3,800 policiesthrough 70 or so agents, which is virtually the entire agency force in the Hawaiian Islands. Founded with a reliance on technology as one of its core values, the 40-person company operates with only Dobbins, Long, and one trainee as the entire IT staff.

The Tropics system is the first of two major applications it runs. Using an Oracle database and running on its Windows 2000 network, HEMIC has kept up with its growth without problems. Its currently testing WebTropics, which should be live by the time you read this, and which allows both policyholders and agents to have access to policy information, claims summaries, premium payment information, etc., all via the Web.

Recently HEMIC added ImageRight (www.imageright.com) imaging and document management as its other main application, which it installed initially for claims, underwriting, and premium audit. HEMIC installed a high-speed Kodak 3500 scanner, which can scan the front and back of documents at 60 documents per minute. Using temps six days per week, HEMIC scanned all its documents in less than six monthsand then shredded all the paper. Today, everyone uses the imaging system.

In mid-2001, Dobbins needed to move to Atlanta for family reasons. By this time, he and Long had evolved into a team, with Dobbins doing the software and database work and Long doing the network and hardware work. So HEMIC formally set up new job descriptions, with Dobbins as director of IS and Long as director of network services. Using Citrix software to dial in, and teleconferencing for meetings, Dobbins is able to handle virtually all his job responsibilities remotely. Long pitches in for the things Dobbins cant do, like physically loading software onto the network.

Telecommuting via Citrix is working so well that the company is now expanding it to their claims and premium auditorsobvious candidates to work from home, of course. Theyre all located in Hawaii, thoughone mainlander is enough.

Riki J. Fujitani

Island Insurance

Island Insurance is a minority-owned insurance company, located in downtown Honolulu. Started by a Japanese immigrant more than 70 years ago to write insurance for the under-served Asian community in Hawaii, the company has grown to an $80 million carrier, still serving that market. It writes only in the Hawaiian Islands, and about 60 percent of its business is personal lines. It tries to write whatever their customers need, so the remaining 40 percent includes commercial property, liability, workers comp, commercial auto, bonds, and related coverages. It writes exclusively through 39 independent insurance agencies, eight of which provide the bulk of their business.

Riki Fujitani is vice president of information technology, with slightly fewer than 30 of the companys 250 employees reporting to him. He didnt get to this position the way you would expect; after graduating from UC Berkley with a degree in electrical engineering, he worked for TRW for a while, then went to the business school at UCLA, then worked for IBM for more than five years. He then got a law degree from the University of Hawaii, and was in private practice for three years.

On one particular case, he was on the opposing counsel team of a complex Hawaiian land trust case, and got to know the man who would become the CEO of Island Insurance. In 1999, that CEO brought Fujitani on board to improve the claims operation. When the company did a management reorganization, Fujitani was asked to run the IT department.

Island had been a PMSC customer. Just before Fujitani got there, with its PMSC contract approaching renewal, the company negotiated a 10-year business outsourcing contract with Inspire (www.nspr.com). As part of the deal, Inspire set up a large data center and call center in the Island home office, with the intent of leveraging these investments to gain a bigger presence in the state.

In the third quarter of 2000, Island and Inspire realized their deal wasnt strategic to either of them, and mutually agreed to cancel the contract. That left Island with an unusually large amount of hardware, a beta version of software, and short time frame to decide whether to renew or pull the plug on the PMSC system.

After a short evaluation of other software vendors, it decided to finish the project, using Inspires client-server software that it now owned. The job was given to Align 360, a consulting company with a significant insurance implementation practice. With some help from key Inspire people, and a tight time frame with no room for error, Fujitani says Align 360 met every deadline, bringing the system live exactly on time. It was operational on the insurance side, but had a large data center and a sophisticated 60-seat call center left over.

In order to leverage these facilities, and as an inducement to help hire scarce IT talent, the technology division of Island Insurance was set up as a separate corporation, with Fujitani as the president and a mandate to go get outside business. Hoike.Net (it means information in Hawaiian) has Island Insurance as its main client, of course, but is alreadysuccessfullypursuing other business accounts. It turned the call center into a co-location facility, using 10 of the seats itself and signing up a local bank for ten more. It still has 40 seats left to rent, but the bank alone helps to cover the ongoing costs. Its already won some local government contracts for the data center, as well, but it has yet to sign up any competing insurance companies due to the competitive nature of the local insurance market.

Meanwhile, Islands back-office system is now live, with end-to-end processing for its personal lines business, and the back-end processing for commercial. Its still using local vendor ICE Systems for the front-end rating and policy issuance of commercial lines. With the rush of user testing and implementation over, IT is going to focus on its newer, out-facing business opportunities for a while, and let the insurance side get back to processing insurance.