Getting the Most out of your Existing Investments

Although technology does not seem poised to deliver a magic bullet in 2008, it will offer subtle opportunities—which could yield dramatic results—to enhance processes simply by allowing organizations to get more from their existing applications. Two areas in particular are worth exploring.

MS SharePoint: its benefit to insurers

An imperative for the coming year will be to determine what MS SharePoint can—and cannot—do for your company. If your organization is like most, you probably have made huge investments in heterogeneous software systems. Communication between these systems is usually difficult at best. One area at which SharePoint excels is its portal framework, which pulls these disparate systems together. It can serve as a single point of contact for your separate applications.

SharePoint offers a portal where organizations can create a customizable interface to access information. To an end-user, it looks seamless. SharePoint can pull information from a policy admin system, a claims management system, an accounting system, a CRM application, and even from the documents within your document management/imaging repository. Companies can also flow items, and, to an extent, automate certain processes—all from a single interface.

Collaboration is another of SharePoint’s most notable benefits. Users have a workspace for documents, word templates, form templates, and tasks, where they can easily share ideas and information. SharePoint offers insurers the opportunity to take advantage of real-time communications via Instant Messenger. Behind the scenes, it integrates with your document management system, which serves as your main archive.

The challenge in 2008 is to determine how (and if) SharePoint fits into your current infrastructure. If you currently have a portal, or an existing collaboration piece, do you need SharePoint? On the surface, it seems to offer all things to all organizations. Although it does have document management- and records management-type capabilities, closer inspection reveals that currently it does not offer all of the rules, flexibility, ease of use, and robustness to handle high-volume record trails, auditing, and other operations that are needed in the insurance industry. Since SharePoint is not a replacement for the standard EDM systems that are available today, how can you use it to augment your existing document management system? In the coming year, as organizations become more familiar with SharePoint, they will need to invest time and energy into separating the reality from the hype.

SOA: the evolution of Web services

I know what you’re thinking: “SOA? As a trend for 2008?” The fact is that SOA as a concept has been around for decades. Previously, our ability to truly take advantage of its potential was limited by proprietary technology and standards. Insurance companies have historically been made up of legacy or stand-alone applications (or a mixture of both). Organizations were unable connect these applications to share information. Processing was slow, and in many cases, redundant. Data silos were hard integrated, each with specific code to allow integration and accessibility.

SOA gives companies the ability to create an integration path to a single application, and then makes it accessible to other applications for reuse. One service call can be used to facilitate communication between multiple systems. With SOA, insurers can design entire new processes by pushing and pulling information to and from their legacy systems.

Are you able to visualize the building blocks to an efficient, cost-effective IT architecture? Chances are that this vision resembles some of the promises made over the years by various IT professionals. You can start to see the ability to create, eliminate, and simplify processes simply by reusing and extending what you already have. You can unify information from complex disparate systems to create singular, cohesive processes. In the coming year, the challenge will be to simplify your processes without taking away functionality. SOA and Web services are making it possible to increase functionality by extending these applications. Instead of reinventing the wheel, invent it once. Then reuse it.

One of the best ways to improve your bottom line is through more efficient back-office processing. This is obviously not a new revelation. But as the software world slowly moves away from proprietary standalone products and standards, carriers who jump on board will be able to leverage SOA and Web services to streamline operations, cut costs, and increase productivity. When you can deliver and extract data to and from your existing applications, you can automate more processes. You can offer opportunities for self-service and STP. This will appeal to your customer base, and will lessen the workload for your staff. In 2008, the walls will begin to come down.

For more information or to schedule a demonstration, please Contact DocFinity now.