The end of the dot-com boom brought about the dismantling of many e-business groups formed by insurance carriers, but a recent study by research firm Celent Communications suggests top-tier carriers need to maintain their e-business groups and refocus them in five key areas. Using the acronym SEUSSStrategy, Education, Usability, Security, and StandardizationCelent senior analyst Matt Josefowicz believes insurers will face difficult integration issues in the future if they abandon their e-business groups.
It became fashionable for insurers to organize their Internet unit into an e-business group back in the late 1990s, Josefowicz says, because it allowed the company to react in what was then called Internet time. It also was a way to convince tech-savvy workers they werent joining some stodgy, old insurance carrier, but rather were with a company looking to build a strong electronic presence.
Today, with the Internet having become such an integral part of a carriers overall strategy, many companies feel the work of the e-business group can be rolled into the IT department. Josefowicz claims two factors have created the push to abandon the e-business group. One is tightening budgets, he says. The other is the way the Web has permeated the industry, becoming a key part of the overall technology infrastructure of the industry.
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