ACORD CIO Panel: Reality Is Closer Than You Think
And, according to Salzmann, the world is moving in that direction. "One in four telemarketers that talks to you on the phone is talking to you from his bedroom..."
While Bill Jenkins, CIO of General Accident, may not be quite ready to remove all the bricks, he concurs that the key to the future is technology, and that the future is not somewhere, "off in the distance." Says Jenkins, "The future is now and in order to survive in the future, companies and agents must embrace technology."
Salzmann and Jenkins were two of the panelists at the <%=company%> opening general session, a town meeting entitled, "Challenges CIOs Face in Preparing for a Whole New World." Joining Salzmann and Jenkins were fellow CIOs, Ron James, Zurich Personal Insurance, and Don Williams, Selective Mutual. Moderating the panel was ACORD president and CEO, Gregory A. Maciag.
Resonating throughout the room was the raw energy of a group of people teetering on the edge of change. Salzmann notes, "The ways of doing business that are now currently acceptable may not be even part of our future; and, to find our future, we must abandon some of the traditional means of accomplishing our goals and objectives. Change is more than just improving on how things have always been done." He illustrates his point with a quotation from a Coopers Lybrand publication: "Thomas Edison wasn't trying to improve the candle when he invented the light bulb." Our collective future, for agents and for companies, may include ideas never before experienced and, that at first thought, may seem to be "impossible."
Twenty years ago when bank machines were introduced, many initially dismissed them as a passing fad… machines would surely never replace the familiarity of face to face contact with a bank teller. Today it is a relatively safe assumption that many bank customers go weeks, if not months and maybe years, without ever actually stepping foot in a bank.
Automatic tellers give 24-hour access. After having become accustomed to such access, it is difficult to imagine how we managed before when banks operated during rather inconvenient hours.
So now the insurance industry stands poised to embark on the same kind of radical change. All this change makes some agents and companies nervous. The Internet has created a whole new form of communication and with change, sometimes we lose self-confidence; change is uncomfortable. Agents are saying, "are companies doing enough?" Companies are saying, "are agents doing enough?" The reality is that both agents and companies have to do their part. According to audience member Rick Morgan, president of Automated Management Group, the most important element is, "wherever everyone is, they have to be on the same page."
This points toward the need for a standard that pushes and pulls people to use a single-entry, multiple company interface. According to Zurich's James, creating a universal standard will "drive the costs down and make everyone more efficient and profitable. There is a real need to define the mission."
Are companies and agents frightened at the prospect of so much information sharing? Hasn't our industry in the past survived with proprietary systems? Perhaps it has survived, but in order to thrive, there needs to be change. Says Salzmann, "We (companies) need each other. Agents need more than one carrier and carriers need more than one agent. We have a critical mass that we need to maintain. Yes we compete. Yes, we want to get the best business from the other carriers in the industry. However, on the other hand, we need a critical mass for this competition to be viable. ACORD plays a unifying role in bringing this together in helping standardize what we do."
"The key," says Bill Jenkins, is to move information--the challenge is to "get it there, get it right, get it quick." And it is the subject of moving and manipulating information that makes some people edgy. Greg Maciag asked the following questions regarding information: Who owns the information? Who controls the information? Who can access the information? Do you need to know "how it works"?
There were varying responses to this set of questions, including:
- "He who owns the data owns the business."
- "It's more important to know what the data is instead of where the data is."
- "He who owns the relationship owns the data. It's not important who owns the data...what is important is the relationship."
The responses illustrate that there is not agreement in this industry about how information is distributed and held.
What about the Year 2000? Are both companies and agents technologically ready to face the calendar change? According to audience member Pat Borowski of the PIA, "A lot of agents still believe that there is a lot of time. Companies need to communicate with agents to let them know when they are compliant."
Even though companies have purportedly tried to get the message across to agents about the importance of becoming Year 2000 compliant, it appears that not everyone has been listening. Speaking from the audience, Jim Kellner, president of Applied Systems, says that his company is shipping out about 250 agency updates per week. "The downside," says Kellner, is that of those 250 customers who are ready to take a Year 2000 update, only about 50 percent are loading it. The agencies that have upload capabilities unfortunately have carriers which aren't ready for a Year 2000 solution that matches our upload/download capabilities and they don't want to lose their upload in a Year 2000 compatible system."
It may be hard to believe, but according to Jenkins, "There are a number of companies who don't understand what the Year 2000 is and they are not going to be compliant. That's going to turn out to be a competitive advantage for those companies who do know."
Those companies who are just starting to determine that it really is going to be a problem may not be able to recover. "If anyone is still touching any code or has any systems to get ready, they're in trouble because it's over in October. This October agents are doing quotes for business that is effective January 1, 1999 which will be expiring January 1, 2000," notes Salzmann.
The failure to act may spell big trouble for companies. Don Williams sums it up, "I don't think that technology is going to make a company; but it sure will break one if it is improper."
The panelists, discussing the role of ACORD, agreed that the emergence of ObjX technology is overwhelmingly positive. They believe that it is definitely the wave and the way of the future and that it is a great way to go into the future. ObjX technology is something that everyone can use, and it is flexible and reusable technology, they note.
"As we move forward, ObjX technology is one of the best things that we can use. It will help us standardize so we are not continually reinventing the wheel," says Jenkins. Salzmann asked rhetorically about ACORD, "Do they perform as a change agent? Not only with ObjX technology, not only with reducing the number of forms that we are being required to use by regulatory agencies, but through their publications. How many agents have used their agency evaluator software? How many have learned how to handle paperless transactional filing? How many have learned how to build a database?" ACORD is, and needs to continue to be, a 'unified change agent.'"