Of course, thats not as long as most of our examples above have been around, but according to National Underwriter Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Sam Friedman, SEMCI has been on the minds of agents and others since at least September 1981. Thats close to 22 years.

Maybe you can remember talking about SEMCI prior to that date, but most of our experts seem to think that SEMCI became an issue at about that time.

Over the years since then, the industry has endured much discussion and seen precious little progress on the SEMCI issue. A number of software vendors have announced a partial or full solution (and some of them may have been right), but adoption by the industry has not followed.

When I came into the insurance industry from the technology sector five years ago, I said that the technology to achieve SEMCI already existed. That didnt change the fact, however, that no one was producing it, buying it or implementing it.

The struggle, it seems, is not about technology, but about how much information carriers want to share with independent agents. Understandably, insurers dont want to have their products reduced to commodity statuswhere buyers look at a spreadsheet of quotes from carriers and make a pick based on price alone.

On the other hand, price isnt the only factor that affects a consumers choice, so maybe insurers need to be more effective at marketing those other factors.

In any case, weve decided to mark the start of the SEMCI clocks seemingly interminable ticking at September 1981 (the nearest we could get to an exact date), and to chronicle its advance in Agency Technology on the Cutting Edge as the months (and years?) go by.

Will the clock finally stop ticking? Only when single-entry is common practice and that seems a long way off.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, May 12, 2003. Copyright 2003 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.