COWBOY: I got a dog named Jake!

PSYCHIC: Has he passed recently?

COWBOY: Passed what?

PSYCHIC: When did he die?

COWBOY: He aint dead, but I was thinkin about him, like you said.

PSYCHIC: Wait! Who is Velma?

COWBOY: A character in a detective novel?

A woman sitting three rows away from the cowboy pipes up.

WOMAN: Ooo! Ooo! I had a great grandma named Alma. She was in the rodeo before the turn of the century.

PSYCHIC: Yes, thats right. I sense she is deceased.

WOMAN: Oh my, amazing!

PSYCHIC: And she just loved to ride her horses.

WOMAN: Actually, she was the rodeo clown, so she never rode, but she did like to put quarters in the machine when mama rode the mechanical horse outside Woolworths.

PSYCHIC: Like I said, a love of horses. And she was always looking for change of a dollar.

WOMAN: Wow! How could you know that?

PSYCHIC: Im talking to her now. She says your mama loved horses, too.

WOMAN: Well, Mama did spend a lot of time playing the ponies.

PSYCHIC: Wait, theres more! Granny Alma says your mama liked to take chances, especially where there was money involved.

WOMAN (astounded and in tears): Oh my, I am so impressed!

So what do you call it when someone tells you things you already know, but makes them seem like a revelation? In the insurance industry, we could call it being “AUGIED.”

As many of you readers know, AUGIE (the ACORD Users Groups Information Exchange) undertook a survey of agents this year to find out what they wanted and needed in the way of technology.

The group offered a preview of the survey results at this years ACORD Technology Conference, and your crack reporter was there to find out just what in the technology world makes sense for agents.

Let me sum it up by telling you which results were surprising and which ones told us something we didnt already know. (Were pausing here to think. Picture a peaceful summer evening, warm breeze, crickets cricking)

Okay, so there was nothing new, except for a couple of minor items about how agents budget for IT and how many of them use broadband connections.

Dont believe it? The speaker for ACORD who did the preview, when asked about which results surprised him, said, “One of the most surprising things was how so much of it wasnt that surprising.”

I asked the president of one of the agent user groups involved in AUGIE what he had learned from the survey that he didnt already know. His immediate answer: “Nothing.” He did add, though, that he felt “validated,” for what thats worth.

One of the most painful interviews I did was with another AUGIE member who has been involved in similar research for an agent organization. “What did you learn from the results that you didnt already know?” I asked.

My subject looked up, opened his mouth in a kind of “O” shapeand stayed that way for a good 20 seconds. Im telling you, I havent seen anyone look heavenward so long since that TV preacher claimed he needed a million dollars or God was going to kill him.

All he could come up with, though, were those two minor points I already mentioned. Its sad, really.

So after lots of closed-door meetings, working up questions with a consultant, launching the survey to agents, principals and CSRs, and crunching the numbers, we have results that tell us that agents hate proprietary insurer systems and duplicate entry, and they want carriers to spend more on developing single-entry.

You know, Ive only been in insurance for about five years, and I already knew that. In fact, I dont think theres a person in this industry who doesnt already know that.

And what did it cost to find out what we already knew? More than a ticket to the psychic, dead-people-talking guys show, I can tell you that. ACORD estimated the consulting costs at roughly $10,000 to $12,000. Other AUGIE members said that didnt include “soft costs,” like volunteer time spent working on the project by user groups and ACORD personnel.

Interestingly, the ACORD preview presentation included an agent quote that summed up the situation nicely: “This is easily the 15th year in a row filling out the same questions.” Not too good for a survey that claimed to be a “first of its kind.”

So what happens next? AUGIE said it needs to determine “what exact messages and recommendations” will come out of the survey results. Translation: Now we have to figure out what to do with this revolutionary information that you already knew about.

How long will the agent community tolerate being AUGIED? Well, its been about 20 years on single-entry alone, and theres no real end in sight.

AUGIE needs to stop the closed-door meetings, announce and promote strong recommendations to help agents with technology, and stop pretending that the problem rests with agents alone.

Wait! I sense that someone out there wants to respond.

Senior Editor Ara C. Trembly is NU's tech guru. He can be reached at [email protected].

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, June 3, 2002. Copyright 2002 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.