As with anything in life, it helps to know what you're looking for. Take technology, for example. How many times have vendors described their product to meet the specs in a request for proposal rather than indicate what the product actually is or does? That can be an important issue when dealing with a challenge as expansive as enterprise content management.

It is imperative for insurers to define what ECM is in their company, stresses Mike Sciol?, CIO with the IFG Companies. Areas such as imaging and workflow often are used to describe content management, but Sciol? maintains ECM goes well beyond certain processes that are more closely associated with document management.

“Enterprise content management is building and maintaining a collaborative group of systems that converse to produce or create something of value for the company,” says Sciol? in giving his definition.

He sees ECM as enabling systems used by business users in the product, underwriting, and actuarial areas to come together and automatically update the policy administration system. “For instance, you want to create a new product line,” he says. “[The departments] have different sets of systems where they enter everything, including rate calculations, underwriting rules, and product-specific forms. Those systems then can generate output and update the policy administration system with little IT involvement, if any.”

ECM is receiving an increased focus today, according to Karen Furtado, a partner with the consulting group SMA, despite the current financial dilemma the insurance industry is navigating. The reason? The push for greater efficiency has kept ECM in the forefront.

“People are looking at improving process and reducing cost,” she says. “[ECM] is a proven technology that helps companies be more efficient and effective with fewer people. It isn't just a way to get people to do more.”

Furtado finds insurers amazed at how much additional business their employees can handle by using systems such as ECM. “Companies are embracing the fact there are better ways to do business rather than passing paper around and spending a lot of money to file paper,” she says.

REMOVING SILOS

Furtado concedes there is an active debate over whether companies should embrace enterprise software and enforce its usage as opposed to examining the assets in place and how they can be utilized.

“Companies that take a prudent approach and bring [enterprise solutions] in as a point solution to resolve a particular situation and then expand it out are among the most successful companies using ECM,” says Furtado. “It's like picking a pilot project without naming it a pilot. [Companies] went after a point of pain, but they certainly are able to use it within, say, a claims operation.”

Some praise ECM for eliminating many of the silos insurance carriers operate in, but Sciol? credits the implementation of service-oriented architecture for facilitating that process.

“Prior to service-oriented data architecture, you had a push/pull systems flow,” he says. “When one group made changes, thus updating the database, there was a data transfer program that took all that data and pushed it into a second database, transforming the data–the old ETL [extraction, transformation, and load]. With SOA, you don't need to transfer data like you used to, which is absolutely the most innovative thing that has come around in the last 10 years. With SOA, you have the ability to cross different planes, get data, and update whatever it is that needs updating. If you have migrated in that direction, you have already gotten away from the siloed nature of the business.”

BETTER WORKFLOW

A key element of ECM takes place in documenting business processes, when carriers take a multistep process and cut it down to half that number of core steps. “Sometimes people automate their workflow, but it's the same workflow,” says Furtado. “It's in automated fashion, but people still are
making decisions.”

The technology is there to make decisions, points out Furtado. “[The solution] knows to send it to an underwriter rather than have someone channel it to the underwriter,” she says. “There are complete steps being removed from the workflow. [The steps] still are being performed but in an automated fashion. It's significantly reducing the times for new business processes.”

Sarah Krause, supervisor of commercial lines underwriting for SECURA Insurance Companies, points out the advantage of ECM from a management perspective is being able to see all the work her staff of underwriters has at any one time.

“If someone is out of the office, it is easy to shift workloads,” she says. “It's also much easier from a customer-service perspective. Anyone on the floor can open the file and give [customers] the information they are looking for.”

From a corporate governance standpoint, Ernie Pearson, director of IT at SECURA, indicates his company is able to audit the processes and manage them more consistently. “Prior to the implementation, there was a fairly high level of variability in how people did things,” he says. “Now, you have more consistent and manageable processes.”

Greg Doctor, senior vice president of claims for Global Aerospace, an aviation insurer, explains his team of claims handlers constantly is faced with the prospect of trying to do more with less. “We are trying to provide better service with fewer people and provide more efficiencies,” he says. “One of the things we need to do is improve or enhance our ability to operate as an integrated team that is positioned all across the country. The best thing about this solution is it gives all of us access to all of the file materials. That allows us to help each other by doing local tasks for someone who might be on the other side of the country managing a claim.”

KICKING AROUND

Electronic documentation has been an idea Global Aerospace has been kicking around for at least 10 years, notes Doctor.

“It's something we've always had a vision of doing because of the efficiencies it would create, mostly because we are a company that has different locations throughout the U.S. and the world, and the ability to share information without shipping files was very attractive to us,” he says.

Initially, a couple of people in Global Aerospace's claims group developed an internal document system strictly for claims that attempted to integrate all the things the carrier's claims handlers did into one system.

“It was a good system for us because of the specialized nature of our business,” says Doctor. “But it had its limitations, mostly because it was developed by claims people, not IT programmers.”

When the company became Global Aerospace in 2000, a new system was introduced that, Doctor explains, was mainly a financial system. “It was very comprehensive and managed information across different parts of the business, but it was not a great claims system, and it wasn't designed to be a claims system,” he says.

Global Aerospace rekindled the old homegrown system, built a comprehensive claims-handling system that would be appropriate, and finally has invested in a new OnBase system from Hyland Software.

GOVERNANCE AND COMPLIANCE

One area Global Aerospace is working on is a document retention module, according to Thomas Assenza, vice president of IT services for the insurer. “What we need to do better is work with our compliance department to document or develop what our corporate document retention plans are,” he says. “Then we can use the software to take those rules and marry them to the plan and apply it to all the different areas where we are going to be using the application.”

At the corporate level, Global Aerospace has its own set of rules to abide by and work through, points out Assenza. From a regulatory perspective, there are no SOX-type compliance issues, but there are internal standards Assenza believes need to be maintained. “The software will allow us to provide greater auditing capabilities,” he says.

“Having things organized in a way that is consistent with reporting requirements will be beneficial to us,” agrees Doctor.

Dealing with governance issues, such as e-mail retention and phone-call retention, is much easier thanks to ECM, affirms Furtado. “It's concise,” she says. “It used to be we were concerned about storage. Now, you can put a policy in place and follow its outcome. [Content] is automated and retained in one place, so it is much easier to put governance policies in place.”

Sciol? points out there are two discernable paths when it comes to governance and regulatory compliance: compliance prior to writing business and compliance after the business has been written.

“ECM facilitates, streamlines, and provides visibility into the filing process or compliance prior to the business being written,” he says. “Department of insurance filings of rates and forms for standard lines business will benefit tremendously from ECM. It eliminates the silos and provides the necessary transparency along with controls to govern implementations properly. Work efforts between different business units are conducted in parallel as opposed to sequentially. For example, if a form needs to be modified for DOI acceptance, pricing and underwriting are able to continue their efforts without dependence on product.

“Most post-issuance regulatory requirements are reporting focused with deadlines that are completely separate from filing,” continues Sciol?, specifying areas such as financial reporting, data calls, Medicare, OFAC, and ALIR regulations, among others.

ACHIEVING COMPLIANCE

Most companies traditionally are reluctant to spend money on compliance initiatives. “If someone suggests bringing in an ECM solution to handle compliance, it would get the lowest vote on the list of projects,” asserts Furtado.

But once carriers begin to embrace ECM and implement it across the enterprise, she believes it has a great impact on compliance. “Remember all those rooms with auditors and piles of paper?” she asks. “Now, [insurers] offer auditors access to a system to review files. The great thing about content management is it's not just a piece of paper, but it is embracing the whole workflow–the call, the letter, everything. It makes the auditor's job easier and puts the company in the best light it can be in.”

For commercial lines, most of the discussion at SECURA revolved around improved processes and being more efficient, explains Krause.

“When we first started we just mirrored the system after what we were doing at that time so people could focus more on learning the software and not worry about how they do their job,” she says. “Once they learned the software, we introduced them to some benefits to improve the processes. We've been able to shave a lot of time off some processes.”

One process in particular went from a 90-day turnaround time to seven days.

The process at SECURA once was to photocopy whatever the underwriters felt the risk manager would want to see and send it to the risk manager through the mail, relates Krause. “I would e-mail this was coming, but they had to wait a week for it,” she says. “Now, they are linked into the same system and can look at the entire file. We can create a task for them in the workflow. Information flows much quicker and better.”

Pearson agrees SECURA can manage and monitor its processes more easily and effectively than in the past. “The flow of work is controlled by the system and can be monitored,” he says. “As long as you have implemented the controls and flows properly, that's what is going to happen.”

The company is able to provide information to external agents and auditors more easily than in the past. “When people come to our office, the tools we are able to give them allow them to do their job more quickly and efficiently than they were able to do in the past,” says Pearson. “That means reinsurers or someone from the department of insurance.”

Reinsurers have shaved off easily 25 percent of the time it used to take them to do their work at SECURA's office, Krause adds. “We are able to access the information they want and provide it for them on an encrypted disk if they want, so they don't even have to come here to the office,” she says.

CHAMPIONING THE CAUSE

At SECURA, the champion for the company's ECM project was the vice president of commercial lines underwriting, according to Pearson. “It didn't start out as an enterprisewide initiative,” he says. “But no one else was standing up for it. Ultimately, it would be adopted in other areas as people saw the benefits.”

Krause maintains her department saw many benefits to ECM from the start, and since its inception, the value of the carrier's ImageRight solution from Vertafore has been demonstrated to other business units.

“I had to speak at several meetings in other departments to give people a flavor of what it was,” she says. “The light bulb started to go off for other departments.”

At Global Aerospace, it was decided the claims department would be the leader of the ECM project. “One of the reasons was because we had people with aptitude and interest to try this plus we probably had the largest need,” says Doctor.

“The claims department had specific business processes we engineered and developed, and it was those processes we were targeting with a workflow solution,” adds Assenza. “It made the project move forward and contributed to the success of the implementation.”

Global Aerospace went live with the solution this summer, and already there has been positive feedback about the implementation. “Other departments are hearing about it, and they are waiting their turn to be introduced to the technology and move forward,” says Assenza. “We have a plan over the next two years to move everyone into this technology.”

Sponsorship is important, particularly from one of the business units, because as Sciol? points out, too often IT goes into sponsorship/steering committee meetings and gets too technical. “[IT] gets to the point where it says this is what we are going to do, this is how we are going to do it, and this is when we are going to deliver it,” he says. When the business people evaluate the what and the when, then they get a little nervous. Then they go back and start questioning the how because they don't understand it.”

Sciol? maintains what normally happens is the business wants the time frame shortened or it wants more out of the project. “That's typically where things blow up in the process,” he says. “If there is a professional trust between the business and IT, the how is irrelevant. Business doesn't need to know the implementation will be via services using MSF or BPEL with SOA Suite. It's almost like me going to actuarial and asking how it derives its rates and then questioning the timeliness of delivery.”

There also is the unseen agenda at steering committee meetings, continues Sciol?. Key issues include failed deliveries; deliveries that have taken too long; rollouts that have a lot of bugs; the inability to communicate a holistic view of the business interaction; and management issues around how projects are delivered, for instance, the inability to partition projects into finite deliverables.

“Those elements cause mistrust in the business,” says Sciol?. “That's the reason many of these programs get shot down, especially the ECM piece. You have to look at things holistically from 100,000 feet and then drill down into attainable deliverables every two to three months”

EVERYDAY ACTIVITIES

Traditionally, dealing with compliance issues has taken on what Furtado calls a shotgun approach. “An audit would be taking place, and people would stop their regular tasks and work overtime to pull the necessary data for the audit,” she says. “Now, there are processes that support the fact they have done everything they need to do along the way. The data is captured and in one place, and the processes make it an everyday occurrence so someone doesn't have to do some exception work. It is more proactive. As a company, you have to embrace that technology can help you from a business standpoint.”

Companies continue to complain about compliance, yet when it comes down to the opportunity to do something about it, they withhold their support, contends Furtado.

Supporting an ECM solution helps more than just compliance, though.

“[ECM] has an impact on the number of people you need to hire,” she says. “This is part of a solution rather than a component that sits by itself.”

At some point, compliance needs to get some love from inside the corporate suite. “The more [ECM] can be brought into the fold of necessary technologies, it will not need as much [to get] the vote,” she says. “Certainly, compliance never is going to be the reason ECM is embraced.”