When asked, "What is your agency's greatest challenge in supporting automation?" 48.9 percent of the 4,394 respondents to this question cited "learning and using various company proprietary systems," while another 20.2 percent said "multiple user IDs and passwords."

In addition, 46.6 percent of 4,254 respondents cited "duplicate data entry" as their "major automation time waster in doing business today"--by far the biggest single complaint cited in answering this question.

These persistent tech hurdles are having a definite, negative impact on how producers do business. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents either "somewhat" or "strongly" agreed that "difficulty in securing multiple quotes have restricted the number of carriers" from which they seek quotes.

"This is not a healthy trend," said Lisa Leach-Goth, chair of the survey working group, in a statement released with the AUGIE survey results. "Many independent agencies appear to have workflows so dependent on a couple of carriers they are missing out on opportunities to serve clients as they deserve to be served."

Seventy-seven percent of respondents said they were at least "somewhat likely to choose a carrier--even if it is not perceived to be the lowest price"--if their agency automation system "could pre-fill a percentage of the fields" on their carrier's proprietary Web site. Ninety-one percent of the 3,822 answering the question said they at least "sometimes" bypass their agency management system to go directly to company Web sites.

"While carriers have made great strides in making their proprietary Web sites--as they describe it--efficient and convenient, we on the AUGIE Leaders Council worry that without industry-standard, multicarrier workflow, the growth of the independent agency system could be hampered," said Ms. Goth, who is vice president of the New Bethlehem, Pa.-based Charles P. Leach Agency.

On a positive note, "the ability to do real-time transactions has increased dramatically since the 2002 survey," Ms. Goth noted. She said that agency management system providers have interacted with carriers to drive a range of inquiry and other capabilities for agency and brokerage professionals--most involving billing and/or policy inquiry transactions.

The leading "real-time transactions" cited in the survey were policy and billing inquiries (18 percent each), claims inquiries (16 percent), and rating and endorsement processing (13 percent each). About 86 percent of the 5,143 answering this question at least "somewhat agree" that "real-time quoting will help in my workflow."

In other key survey results, it was revealed that a significant portion of agents come up short in certain critical operational areas.

For example, while about 80 percent of those who responded to this question at least "somewhat" agreed that their agency had adopted a specific policy to protect the privacy of client information, that still means one out of five agencies do not have a data security policy in place.

In addition, while about two-thirds of those responding to the question at least somewhat agreed that their agency has adopted a specific disaster preparedness plan, one-third had not, leaving their businesses and their clients exposed in case of a catastrophe.