One of my favorite science fiction novels of all time is Neuromancer, by William Gibson. It is hailed as one of the best SF novels of recent decades and it was the first winner of science fiction's "triple crown"—the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It is considered a benchmark in the cyberpunk subgenre and it is the first work that popularized the term "cyberspace," a word that Gibson first used in an earlier work, and which would be used to describe the early days of the World Wide Web.
Published in 1984, the book was way ahead of its time, envisioning not just a PC revolution, but an advanced version of the Internet where users would interface directly with their minds. The story is of a hacker named Case who is one bad day away from a drug-addled suicide, and how he is recruited by a bunch of shady characters to rehabilitate himself and pull off the greatest hack cyberspace has ever seen. The book is filled with a unique lingo and a supercharged vision of the future that borders on intoxicating for any tech geek who reads it.
One might be tempted to think that Gibson was himself a techno-savant, but that is not so. He knew nothing of computers when he wrote the novel. Its inspiration came from when he saw some kids engrossed by a stand-up videogame and he imagined a world where you could actually enter the game and become one with the computerized world within. He did not even own a computer at the time. Science fiction's greatest novel about the future of networked computing and its effect on human culture was banged out on a Depression-era manual typewriter.
As much as I love Neuromancer, I love the story behind it just as much, because that underscores the central reality of technology: if you think you can use the latest tech to get ahead of the curve, you won't stay there for very long, and chances are, by the time you can afford to upgrade again, you will be hopelessly obsolete. Just ask anyone who has a stack of old laptops in their basement, and they'll tell you.
My father fell into this, once. He ran his own small law firm, and in the early 1980s, he bought a Sulcus point-of-sale computer system for his office. It cost a small fortune, and since Sulcus is no longer around anymore, I can't really tell you what the system did, except that it really improved the efficiency of his main business, which was title searches and real estate settlements. For years, he used that system…well beyond its intended lifespan. But he was so determined to squeeze every last nickel from his investment that by the time he got rid of it, office PC systems were commonplace, and the poor guy was a bit like Rip van Winkle, struggling to comprehend just how much more a new system could do for his office, and just how much less it was going to cost him to upgrade. As I explained to him what his new system could do, he kept asking me, "Yeah, but can it write checks?" Yes, Dad. It can write checks.
I tell these stories because the insurance world is one that was visionary in its early adoption of computer technology, but like my dad, it was so attached to its huge early investment, it kept legacy systems going for decades more than it probably should have. Today, insurers are aggressive IT spenders, but there is always the feeling that there is more ground to be caught up, both in terms of how carriers, agents and brokers can automate and digitize underwriting, record-keeping, policy issuance, claims handling and other core functions. And that is to say nothing of innovations such as predictive modeling, cloud computing, field use of various mobile technologies, and the like.
It is a great time to be driving the IT usage of the insurance industry, for as much as it has improved its own efficiencies, there is still so plenty more that can be done. And it is in that spirit that I welcome you to this inaugural issue of the new Tech Decisions. Going forward, we will be producing this long-running title as a quarterly custom supplement that will focus on the newest innovations across insurance technology, from carrier systems to consumer applications to social media and everything in between. We hope you will enjoy this new chapter in our history…and yours.
— Bill Coffin, Group Editorial Director
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