If we measure it, we can manage it, and then we can start to make decisions to do it better. So says Gareth Morfill, Boston-based senior analyst at Ovum, the London-headquartered analyst and consulting company, in summarizing the goals of business intelligence (BI). But how can insurers best measure their performanceboth at the department level and across the enterpriseand who should do it?

The data for measurement is tantalizingly within reach, with terabytes of information maintained in data warehouses, data marts, operational data stores; that is, within the domain of the IT community. But its the business users who need to make the business decisions. So traditionally, users have had to beg, cajole, and even threaten their IT counterparts to create the reports they neededand then to continually modify those reports as those needs changed.

When I came on board five years ago, we had five individuals who spent a better part of their day responding to internal and external client requests for information, says Jim Klotz, CIO at PMA Insurance Group (Blue Bell, Penn.), a property/casualty insurer specializing in workers compensation and disability income insurance. They were using older tools, running ad hoc reports, doing queries with QMF [Query Management Facility, an IBM language for user interaction with DB2].