We’re quite aware of the fact that the insurance industry has considerably more than its share of acronyms. With examples like ASOP, BOP, CRIS, DEC, and others for every letter of the alphabet, we hardly need any more. But we’ve decided to create one, nevertheless: OWN.

We’ll forgive you if the first thing you think of is the Oprah Winfrey Network. We assume Oprah must have some insurance. But our interests are a little closer to home. It also would be completely understandable if you were thinking of the hare-hunting association chaired by Elmer Fudd, the Outlandish Wabbit Network. You’d be wrong there, too. Ours is more mundane and considerably more functional than that. And the only thing we hunt is satisfied customers. That’s why, to us, OWN means Ours Works Now.

Oh, Look! A Shiny Object!

We’re as forward-looking as the next guys. We love artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, wearable telematic devices, and peer-to-peer networks that return insurance to what it used to be, albeit on a smaller scale; that is, the small contributions of the many protecting against the large losses of the few. We love all that stuff that largely exists in imagination, that lives on drawing boards, and that attracts investors like mosquitos to swamps. But we’re not preoccupied by it.

Our customers have real business to conduct right now. They have prospects who need policies. They have underwriters who need to rate, quote, price, and bind those policies. Our customers have policyholders who need service on their claims. Those policyholders are more interested in the technology at auto-body shops and reconstruction firms than they are in the technology in our Suite. And our customers are more interested in the reality of getting business done today than they are in the promise of getting it done tomorrow.

We’ll Be Right Here

We don’t want to be misunderstood: We’ll be here tomorrow. When any specific technology is required, we’ll have it. But we’ll offer it because our customers want it, have a practical need for it, will use it, and will benefit from having it. In the meantime, our customers won’t be preoccupied with operational headaches. And we won’t be preoccupied by the next bright, shiny object or be chasing the next wild, faddish goose at the expense of realism and pragmatism.

OWN. When it comes to technology, a promise in the future might be pretty. But utility in the present is the key.

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 sense?

“Well, if you look at retail, that industry uses technology for data acquisition, marketing, consumer targeting, customer acquisition, and increased sales. Retail even uses video surveillance and facial recognition to monitor customer behavior!” Point made. But …

How Do You Spell Risk?

Some people might put life, auto, and homeowner’s insurance on their shopping lists. But it’s not likely any large commercial risks or core administration systems will appear on those lists. By the same token, retailers surely have product-liability standards to uphold and commensurate liabilities to disclaim. But they don’t have to comply with stringent national and state-specific regulatory requirements to which insurers are beholden. And while retailers certainly have to manage risks to inventory and customer safety, those risks are of a completely different nature from the ones that define insurance.

In addition to having to take into consideration such things as behavioral trends, actuarial tables, risk profiles, geographic locations, and more, insurers have to protect policyholders’ privacy. Neither do they have the luxury of imposing retail mark-ups or selling policies at bargain basement rates, given the fact that, among the regulatory requirements they have to fulfill is mandatory reserves against claims not yet incurred.

Reality Check

“Well, insurance hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years.”Right again. In fact, it hasn’t changed much since Hammurabi invented it. But a peek below the rhetoric reveals there are reasons for that:

Stability and caution breed the trustworthiness that equates to longevity in the insurance industry. The expression, “Insurance is sold, not bought,” remains stubbornly true, regardless of the fact that most of us need it. And policyholders (understandably) demand more, requiring insurers to provide more, with attendant costs, from already thin margins.

So, yeah. Insurance lags behind some other industries in piling on the technology bandwagon. It’s true. But before we say that disparagingly, let’s understand why it’s true.

After all the benefits of good business sense get passed on to us in the premiums we pay and loss protection we get.

We recently came across the 2018 edition of Top Issues: An Annual Report from PwC. Given how late it is in the year, as well as 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 be the most likely to quickly adjust and grow as the industry continues to become more digital.

While a little vague, that seemed to make sense. After all, the Internet, on which business is increasingly conducted, is a digital medium. And the companies that don’t adapt to all channels of digital accessibility, including mobile, inevitably will be left behind.

But just five pages later, the Report said this:

Most of the industry has adopted digital agendas.

Okay. So, what’s left to do? Much.

Let’s Narrow it Down

One of the most constructive things we might do is ignore all the commotion about digital transformation. While organizations might need to transform (more likely they need to adapt and evolve), digital transformation has become all but indecipherable because it can’t be defined consistently. And it can’t be defined consistently because it’s too broad and, so, too vague.

More important, digital transformation is almost always interpreted to be about technology. It’s not. Here’s why: Unless we manage to experience some kind of once-in-a-millennium event sometime soon, there won’t be any technological transformations. But what we do have is a data transformation.

More specifically, with the digitalization of data — and with the technological progress we’re making in storing, extracting, analyzing, and applying data — that’s a transformation worth heeding and on which we should be capitalizing. And it feels like progress.

What Can We Accomplish?

From risk analysis to claims experience, from risk selection to loss mitigation, from consumer trends to policyholder profiles and more, everything we need to affect real transformation is in the data we collect and process every day.

Yes. We’ll require technology to aggregate that data, to extract and report what we need from it. But that won’t constitute a technological transformation any more than it’ll constitutes a digital one. It might, however, constitute an operational transformation.

Maybe that’s the perspective by which we’ll accomplish the most anyway.

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 to know you.
Prospect: I love that show!
Us: Huh?
Prospect: Never mind.

After the call, we looked up “Getting to Know You” and found out what all the confusion was about. Now we can’t get that darn tune out of our heads.

The Big Picture

Kidding aside, maybe we’re nosey or something; but we like to know our prospects’ businesses before we formalize relationships. To us, that seems more sensible and more productive than signing contracts — then trying to figure out what needs to be done.

So, over and above all the other activity it takes to be identified as their preferred vendor, we typically go to our prospects’ locations and spend three days with them. It gives us the chance to get acquainted with them. It lets us get to know their environments. It helps us to understand their cultures and the ways in which their people interact. It’s a more effective way to familiarize ourselves with their processes and to more completely identify their preferences and define their requirements. And we wouldn’t want this to get out, but it’s also fun.

A Word About Trust

The other reason getting to know you (not the song) is so important to us is that it gives us the opportunity to establish mutual trust. Like honesty and integrity, trust is something that can’t be establishes through talk or writing. At least initially, it has to be earned, ideally face to face. Then it has to be demonstrated — early, often, and with absolute consistency.

So, yeah. Getting to know you is important. And while we might not be as musical as Rogers and Hammerstein, we’ll stick to this tune as long as it works for us … and for our customers.

And based on our customers’ feedback, we do seem to be hitting all the right notes.

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 give the effect of being DOA if it had an ineffective (by any criteria) user interface.

And there’s another important thing to consider.

Age Isn’t Just a Number

To those of us who aren’t getting any older, this may not seem like a big deal. But it would seem that users of software are getting younger. For the insurance industry, that means agents, CSRs, policyholders, claims adjusters, TPAs, and others that need access to our systems are already accustomed to newer, more intuitive, and very user-friendly technology. To them, legacy interfaces feel like trying to perform surgery with a dull butter knife.

That suggests that — aside from aesthetic appeal and clean simplicity — user interfaces should be:

• Easy to use. The easier they are to use, the more work will be accomplished.
• If users of interfaces can manipulate them to do what they need them to do, the way they want to do it, they’ll be more motivated and efficient, as well as more productive.
• Whether it’s driving tasks in the workflow, completing routine tasks, escalating exceptions, or myriad other activities, automation enables people to spend less time engaged in mundane repetition and more time engaged in more strategic contributions to their organizations.

And there’s yet one more thing to consider.

Going Mobile

The Who might have been singing about an entirely different kind of mobility in 1971, but they were on the right track (so to speak). Interfaces that aren’t optimized for and responsive to mobile devices and their designs will be used less frequently. It’s as simple as that. And if your interfaces aren’t going mobile, your expectations should be lower because the number of users certainly will be.

If your constituents can’t access your systems on their smart phones, tablets, and other mobile devices to get updates, conduct transactions, and communicate with the requisite parties, they’ll work with someone else whose systems allow them to do all those things.

If we’re smart, we’ll be all up in their interfaces.