Stephen Applebaum compares the movement in insurance IT to newer, more agile systems to that of a huge ocean liner. "It takes a great deal of momentum to move it at all," he says. "But once it starts moving it's very hard to stop. When I see shifts (in IT spending plans) like this, it impresses me because it takes a lot of energy—and a lot of good business cases—to move projects."
Spending patterns of recent years have remained fairly consistent, according to Applebaum, senior analyst for property & casualty insurance with the Aite Group, adding that making generalizations across an industry made up of some 2500 companies is a dangerous thing to do.
"Probably the biggest shift in terms of change in momentum is the increased spending on customer experience and channel optimization," he says. "In some of the surveys we've done those areas have almost doubled in the amount of investment and rank of priority. That's a pretty big shift in this business. Typically things don't shift a few percentage points, so to see a 10 percent shift in one year is pretty strong."
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