Entries by Mark O'Brien

The Great Awakening: Part Two

In our previous post, we wrote this: The new normals are change and uncertainty. That means The Great Awakening isn’t a one-time event. It’s necessarily ongoing, evolving, and unpredictable. We can evolve with it — embrace it, roll with it, and learn to make the most of it — or not. Since publishing that post, […]

The Great Awakening

P&C Specialist recently published an article that gave us pause. The title of the article is “Insurers Struggle to Keep Staff Connected, Engaged“. In case you haven’t yet subscribed to P&C Specialist, this is the part that caught our attention: With the new world of remote and hybrid work, many employers are struggling to boost […]

Witch’s Glitches: Halloween Edition

Today is Halloween. Most of us expect to be scared today in some form or fashion by someone or other. Ghosts, gremlins, and goblins lurk about, waiting to yell BOO! when we least expect it. If you have anything to do with software, you know ghosts, gremlins, goblins, and glitches have to be contended with […]

A Call to Arms

We don’t consider the insurance industry or insurance technology to be particularly militant. But we suppose it’s possible for martial metaphors to sneak in almost anywhere. At least that’s what we thought when we saw this headline in Carrier Management: “Tech Arms Race Favors Giant Commercial Carriers“. In an interview cited in the article, Mo […]

The Certainty of Uncertainty

Because we work in the insurance industry, we do our best to … well … keep up with the insurance industry. Nevertheless, something PwC published earlier in the year — “Next in insurance: Top insurance industry issues in 2022” — managed to get by us, until now. We were really grabbed by this headline: “The […]

Know Your Vendor

While thumbing through the February edition of CIO magazine, we came to this article: “A tsunami of IT project disasters is on the horizon“. You already feel better about that core system replacement you’ve been contemplating, don’t you? If that didn’t cheer you up, this certainly will: We’re talking spectacular failures that disrupt supply chains, delay […]

Cognitive Dissonance

There was an opinion piece published in May by PropertyCasualty360˚. The title of it is, “Plethora of challenges face the insurance industry on the road ahead”. Most of the piece was fairly predictable. But this caught our attention: Another troublesome challenge for the insurance industry is overcoming cognitive biases, such as recency or legacy biases. […]

Too Costly Overruns

For reasons we can’t even recall, we were doing some research in The Complete and Total History of Abbreviations and Acronyms in the Whole Entire English Language (TCATHOAAAITWEEL) when we came across TCO. We certainly knew TCO stands for Total Cost of Ownership. But we didn’t know that hadn’t always been so. According to the TCATHOAAAITWEEL, […]

The Finys Mailbag

It’s been a while since we opened the mailbag. But given the volume of cards and letters we get, we’re definitely overdue. So, here’s a selection of our recent fan mail: Dear Finys, A vendor recently told me I could have a complete policy administration suite implemented in 20 minutes. Is that true? Sincerely, In […]

Insurance Trends for 2023

Now that we’re almost through the seventh month of 2022, we decided to get a jump on the upcoming year and publish a list of the trends we hope to see in 2023. Since we wrote about no-code/low-code platforms in February of this year, we were inspired to fire preemptively by something we found in […]