Just the other day my office manager came by to drop off my new desk calendar for 2003. While hardly a life-altering event, it highlighted that another year had all but slipped by. Being ever occupied with one aspect or another of producing a magazine, I suppose I hadnt felt the passage of time. But there it was in a glossy cellophane wrapper.
As many of us do, I began to take stock of the year gone by and speculate on whats ahead. I think most of us would agree the last year has been a tough one on many levelsfrom the threat of ongoing global instability to personal healing from recent tragedies. Certainly the financial/business front has suffered and most likely will continue to do so, at least for the near term.
Despite all this, though, I sense a stubborn resilience, evidenced in countless ways. In the insurance industry, the focus is on achieving and maintaining both a solid defense and a strong offensebetter risk management and sustainable growth.
Lets see whats ahead. Based on what industry watchers are speculating, several trends are likely. First, there probably will be continued emphasis on better enterprise risk managementwhether in underwriting or claimsto plug up any leaking profits. Second, insurers will be turning increasingly toward standards and standards-based application integration technologies to transform their legacy systems. Third, IT and business process outsourcing will grow for non-core functions. Fourth, IT will increasingly be leveraged and tapped as a shared service and employ the best ideas and technology, regardless of source. This will lead to new services and products being developed in cross-functional teams.
Finally, insurance will attain a greater awareness about the business it really is inknowledge management. In 1991, data warehousings guru Bill Inmon defined the data warehouse (for more on data warehousing, see Affordable Housing, p. 20) as follows: A data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, nonvolatile collection of data in support of management decisions. I wouldnt worry too much for now about the meaning of most of thisthe key is in the last five words.
If a company can drill down to know that a 32-year-old single female who drives a Jag and owns a condo will have less of a loss experience than a 34-year-old male who drives an Audi and rents an apartment, that company can do more accurate underwriting, set prices based on risk, tailor products, assess customer or product profitability, and figure out its overall financial picture.
Thats one heck of a crystal ball. It has the potential to tell you if your company will be a leader or a laggard. Obviously, technology is pivotal to making all these revelations possible, and it becomes ever more critical as products and services, and the knowledge needed to develop and grow them, increase.
So keep this in mind as you read about industry spending trends for the next year (p. 14) and proven ways to stretch your IT dollar (p. 17). I predict 2003 may not be easy, but it certainly neednt be bleak.
Wishing you joyous holidays and a year of peace, health, prosperity, and much happiness.
Sharon S. Schwartzman
Editor-in-Chief
Want to continue reading?
Become a Free PropertyCasualty360 Digital Reader
Your access to unlimited PropertyCasualty360 content isn’t changing.
Once you are an ALM digital member, you’ll receive:
- Breaking insurance news and analysis, on-site and via our newsletters and custom alerts
- Weekly Insurance Speak podcast featuring exclusive interviews with industry leaders
- Educational webcasts, white papers, and ebooks from industry thought leaders
- Critical converage of the employee benefits and financial advisory markets on our other ALM sites, BenefitsPRO and ThinkAdvisor
Already have an account? Sign In Now
© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
