With p-c carriers looking to expand or improve distribution channels to boost market share, insurers are looking at various agent-related IT projects. “They want to improve their overall relationships with agents and they want to improve their overall technology, to make it easier for agents to sell their products,” Ms. Smallwood said.

Another IT area insurers are focusing on is customer service. For p-c carriers, especially larger, multi-line firms, “when you look underneath the covers in their IT environments, they have separate systems,” Ms. Smallwood said, adding that when clients either call an agent, go on a Web site, call a help desk or a call center, it becomes somewhat of a customer-service challenge to pull all the information together.

On the commercial lines side, she explained, “if I am a customer, and if I have a question about my price on workers compensation, and if I want to talk about my billing on auto, and if I have some claims outstanding on my property side, when I go to the call center its very difficult for them to pull all that information together because they are all separate systems.”

On the personal-lines side, “if I talk to someone or go onto a Web site, I can find out information about my homeowners and auto,” Ms. Smallwood added, “but when I want to talk to someone about my life policies, they say you have to call a different number.” So the goal is to create “an ultimate single viewing”not necessarily one system and one database, but integrating systems and data, she said.

TowerGroup also noted the p-c sector tends to have independent information silos. “So you would have your relationships with agents, underwriting, policy production, billing, claims, and within claims there are even silos. Sometimes, those silos even break down by products,” she said. Over the last 30-to-40 years, more systems have been built for those silos, “so just about every single insurance company has a legacy problem,” Ms. Smallwood added.

These legacy systems, she said, are expensive to maintain, and it takes a long time to introduce new products or features. “They are almost like anchors, so what we are saying is that insurance companies need to, at a minimum, make tough decisions and develop legacy-and-data-integration plans,” she said.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, January 16, 2004. Copyright 2004 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.