The question Im most often asked at trade shows is Whats the hot thing this year? CRM was hot a couple of years ago, and everyone was talking about XML last year, but for the past fewshows, my answer has been, Nothing.
Thats not to say that new products arent coming out, or that existing products arent being improved. They are. But theres little of the hot new stuff weve seen before.
What happened? The economy did. Call it a slowdown, recession, or simply the climate, but its helped put the brakes on the spending habits of a lot of industries, including this one. On the outside at least, the insurance industry has switched to wait-and-see mode when it comes to technology. And the tech vendors are aware of that.
Carriers today are much less interested in implementing anything new. Instead, theyre trying to get the most out of what they already have, and to implement only the kinds of new things that will generate a fairly quick ROI. Big projects and new technologies will have to wait.
There are exceptions, of course. Some companies are willing to start new projects if they sense a quick and clear ROI. Others are continuing on the course theyve set despite the economy. But by and large, the trend for the moment is not towards new and hot technologies, but toward tweaking and getting the most from what youve already got.
But thats on the outside. Behind the scenes, theres much more going on. Richard Feynman once wrote that when he was young, he was asked to fix a radio. Rather than toy with it, he first thought about what could be wrong. When asked what he was doing, he replied, Thinking. And that led to jokes about the boy who fixes radios by thinking.
Today, rather than doing, smart carriers are thinking. Theyre thinking about their systemscurrent and near-future. Theyre thinking about their priority lists for filling the gaps in their technology infrastructure. Theyre thinking about which technologies will be important to the industry and which will be hard-pressed to be more than toys.
Its good to think: Stop for a moment, reevaluate your direction, consider what youve got. Decide on how youll use it, if you need to replace it, and how it fits in with your business plan. In short, the industry is taking a technology breather.
This is a good idea.
A lot of new technologies are just at or getting near maturation (XML, GPS), while others are clearly still in shakeout mode (wireless). Its not always clear howor, in fact, iftheyll eventually fit into your overall business model. But, while budget watching is the new industry pastime, its a good opportunity to work out kinks in your current system while you work out a plan for whichever of the upcoming technologies you think you might implement.
And hopefully next year, when someone asks me what the hot thing is, Ill be able to say, Where do you want to start?
Andrew KantorEditor-in-Chief
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