For all the talk about insurtech, we still live in a world of aging systems, outdated architectures, all required to keep pace with the countless processes required to run an insurance business. Why is that? Much of what’s being touted as insurtech comes from people new to the insurance industry. People who do work in […]
Since we’re in the insurance-technology business, we tend to bristle a bit when we hear and read things about the insurance industry’s ostensible lagging behind some other industries in the adoption of technology. Granting the existence of such lagging, why do people assume it’s a symptom of technology aversion, as opposed to, say, good business […]
We’re nearing the end of 2018. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you might be tempted to think legacy replacements are behind us by now. But you’d be wrong, in part because technology is the least of the challenges we face. A bigger one is change management. And change management is all about […]
We recently came across the 2018 edition of Top Issues: An Annual Report from PwC. Given the accelerating rate of change, we were quite interested to see what might have transpired since the Report was issued in December of 2017. On page 5, we found this: The companies that … design and implement digital platforms … will […]
Fact of life: Data and the processing and transactional functionality that makes use of that data has to reside in a secure environment. Given the number of data breaches that have occurred this year alone, that’s self-evident. So, when the organizations with which you work are reported to be compliant with SOC and other data-security […]
Before people fully realize we’re an insurance-focused, software-development shop, they often think we’re Rogers and Hammerstein fans. For a while, we weren’t sure why that was. Then it hit us. One day, we were on a conference call with a prospect. The discussion went something like this: Prospect: What the most important thing to you? Us: Getting […]
We love the periodic notices we get from various entities with which we work in our personal lives, entities like banks, mortgage companies, auto-finance companies, credit-card companies, and others. They typically go something like this: PLEASE NOTE: Our system will be shut down for the Holidays. As a result, it will be offline from New […]
In a conversation about user interfaces the other day, we were reminded of the old saying, typically attributed to an unnamed doctor: “The operation was a success. But the patient died.” We’re not equating software developers to doctors by any stretch. But it does occur to us that the best software (by any criteria) could […]
According to dictionary.com, infrastructure is defined as: The basic, underlying framework or features of a system or organization The fundamental facilities and systems serving a country, city, or area, as transportation and communication systems, power plants, and schools. The insurance industry typically considers infrastructure to mean the technological architectures within which hardware and software are purchased, deployed, […]
The insurance industry’s debate over whether it’s better to build systems or to buy them dates back almost 3,772 years to the reign of King Hammurabi in Babylon. Within the Code of Hammurabi, the first written insurance policy was inscribed into a Babylonian obelisk. It indemnified debtors against re-paying loans if some personal catastrophe made […]
