Is your policy administration system a trusty old workhorse, still up to the task after all these years? Or is it a coughing and wheezing jalopy, about to break down, leaving you stranded? The truth is we hear from people in both camps. And sometimes those people are colleagues from the same company who work with the same admin systems day in and day out. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, apparently.

If your company takes in new business, calculates premiums, services customers when they call, and pays out claims, then something, surely, must be working. If you do those things in high volume with reasonable speed, then that something probably is scaling well, just like its designers intended when they first pieced the system together 30 years ago.

But the pain that is required to keep an insurance line of business afloat can be excruciating. We never hear, "We love our system from the '70s because it's so easy to add new product features! And that assembler code is really nifty." Never mind the broader issues around speed to market, impossibly complex integration efforts, and possible constraints on service innovation. The day-to-day grind of massaging a policy admin system into something that works is never ending.