Our March cover story in Tech Decisions is on business intelligence and we've been previewing it on the Web site with several interviews.

One of those interviews is with John Lucker, a principal with Deloitte Consulting, and he had some interesting views on why various BI projects—and really any software implementation—fail.

Lucker explains the importance of sticking to the 80/20 rule. He believes scope creep is a major problem for carriers to deal with and the depth and breadth of a BI implementation exacerbates the problem.

"I've been in project planning meetings and clients will say they understand the 80, but what about focusing on a small amount of the business," says Lucker. "They end up focusing an inordinate amount of time on the 20 percent and completely lose track of the business value and the value of time in accomplishing the 80 percent sooner rather than later."

We all know the 80/20 rule (but did you know it's also called the Pareto principle?), but what amazes many people is a company's complete inability to follow it.

As we've all learned, any project involving an insurer's data—or even third-party data—is fraught with peril. The thought of cleaning up all that data into something resembling intelligent information can paralyze a company and has often led insurance carriers to back away from business intelligence in the first place.

But as Lucker points out, the effort isn't nearly as great if you can focus on a large percentage (80 percent) of the data that has similar—and valuable–characteristics and not come up with crazy expectations that every problem will be solved through the use of BI.

Eventually, someone might be able to figure out the remaining 20 percent and by that time your company will have already gained some value from the work already performed—the 80 percent. 

Too many business users expect technology to solve every problem that they deal with and we all know how that theory is working out. Insurers should know this better than anyone that such expectations are foolish; that's why we have an entire market called specialty lines.