Which will you be? Digital hunter or digital prey?
“By 2020, every business will have become either a digital predator or digital prey,” says one Forrester analyst.
That must have sounded like a clarion call to insurance companies. More than half dedicated 2017 IT budgets to digital transformation projects.
It seems no one wants to be digital prey.
But many insurance organizations still stumble when trying to implement their digital visions. They find they have to contend with massive amounts of data, regardless of their company’s size, the market they serve or the intricacy of their digital strategy.
What’s holding them up?
The digital transformation hurdle: Legacy systems
The hurdle? Legacy systems. Outdated, patched-together and slow, these highly siloed systems deliver only a partial view of information. It is difficult to provide insureds with the best possible experience when you are only seeing half the customer information you need to open a new policy, process a claim or pay a commission.
Insurers also have a tremendous amount of content, processes and casework managed by niche or outdated applications outside of the core. Most of this content, generated externally, comes into the organization through the mailroom, an individual’s email inbox, mobile devices, fax, a web-based portal or a secure electronic batch of documents. Add to that the internally generated content created in the context of routine business processes, and you start to see why legacy systems can become unwieldy and unworkable solutions.
That’s not what will make an insurer digital prey. The future will.
Digital hunters are ready for a data-filled future
If an insurer is stumbling with the amount of information they must deal with today, consider a world in which sensors embedded in cars, buildings, appliances and wearable devices deliver real-time data. Photos from drones, status reports from social media, and things still unimagined.
How are insurers going to capture, share, analyze and work with all that information?
Not by patching together systems never intended to integrate. That wastes time, loses money and stifles innovation. Non-digital, manual, paper processes still in wide use introduce additional opportunities for human error and compliance breaches.
Digital hunters are preparing for the future, even if they cannot replace all the legacy systems they rely on to do business. They look for – and find – solutions that integrate with modern core systems and business applications while also extending legacy systems. These solutions:
- Simplify information access and control
- Breathe new life into outdated/legacy systems
- Keep information secure
These solutions also manage the content, cases and processes their core systems cannot. They fill gaps in core systems, such as Guidewire and Duck Creek, with comprehensive enterprise content management capabilities such as capture, document management, secure file sharing, workflow and customer communication management.
The line between digital hunter and digital prey is a thin one. It’s one marked by disrupting the status quo and finding innovative ways to reach true digital transformation.
To learn more, download our latest article: “Disrupt or be Disrupted: Clearing the Path to Digital Transformation.”
