Several years back I was on the staff of SUCCESS magazine, which focused on entrepreneurial business. That position brought a fellow named W. Clement Stone onto my radar screen. I learned he published Success Unlimited, a prior version of my magazine, a few decades earlier. In one of life's interesting coincidences, it seems Stone and I shared an interest in at least a couple of business sectors. Stone also built the Combined Insurance Company of America. His company, which he started with only $100, changed its name in 1987 to a little outfit named Aon Corporation.

One of my favorite Stone quotes is the following: "Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star." This advice, however, prompted me to wonder, Is the moon attainable, i.e., is perfection possible? I know "they" say all perfection takes is practice, but I also know no one is perfect and neither is any system, no matter how good. If there were a perfect system, lots of vendors and IT departments would be hanging a "Gone fishing" sign on their doors.

So, what this then means is we're really not working toward perfection but, more accurately, toward the highest possible standards–and that's a worthy mission. What exactly constitutes this mission in insurance IT? Insurance advisory firm Financial Insights recently published its "Top 10 Strategic Initiatives for Global Insurance for 2006." I found three of the top five initiatives particularly significant.

Ease of doing business. "Insurers have to make it easier for all of the people doing business with them if they are to at least maintain market share. Agents and brokers expect it." According to the study, this entails enabling agents to access information when and how they need it; offering timely, correct downloads to agencies; requiring as few forms as possible; and providing levels of service that correspond to agent profitability.

Platform development. "The insurance value chains are being broken into key pieces of business functionality, including pricing, rating, first notice of loss, and surrender values. In 2006, insurers will accelerate their development of service-oriented architecture [SOA] platforms with increasingly more Web services exposing business functionality."

Protecting the firm. "Security threats will come even faster and in more places as more devices are used to access information throughout the insurer's value chains."

Yet another of life's interesting coincidences is this issue was planned months ago to include a feature on strategies for achieving each of these three initiatives–agent technologies (p. 16), SOA (p. 12), and security (p. 20). The topics were chosen, in part, because they all are never ending and always evolving challenges at the core of the insurance business. Such initiatives never are "done." As their requirements grow, so does the level of sophistication needed to manage them, which in turn, creates a demand for more sophisticated knowledge that, not coincidentally, can be found in these pages. Such challenges are tough, but they can be met, or as Stone has been quoted as saying: "Whatever the mind of man can conceive, it can achieve."