Information technology is now used in all walks of life. Insurance service organizations are among the largest users of IT. It is a challenge for insurance companies to keep their staff up to date on IT knowledge so that they can make the best use of the IT implementation. You often see a lot of money spent on implementing a technology, only to find out at a later time that it wasn’t the one that was needed or that it remained underutilized.
If we try to categorize the use of information technology in the insurance service, we can place various uses in the following three categories: document and knowledge management, workflow automation, and business intelligence and analytics. We are going to map them with some of the important insurance functions such as underwriting, product design, product packaging, policy administration, claims management, customer relationship management, etc.
Activities such as risk underwriting and product design/packaging rely heavily on knowledge management, powerful analytics, and business intelligence techniques. Every Insurance Organization must have some Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence software or if not, they must be implementing them in the near future. In order to make the best use of knowledge management and business intelligence techniques, users must have sufficient knowledge of when and where which technique can be useful.
At the same time, they also need sufficient practical knowledge about the software/tool implemented or to be implemented in the organization. This knowledge depends on the software. If the software is changed in the future, the screens and options will change and users will need to be retrained on the new software. However, the first body of knowledge that deals with the techniques themselves does not depend on the software. This knowledge continues to be enriched with use and experience and makes the user more powerful in applying it in practice.
Policy administration and claims management are activities in which document management techniques and workflow automation are mainly implemented. Customer relationship management also requires good business intelligence and analytics techniques. In all those implementations and applications, we find that two sets of user-level insights are required to make the best use of them. The first set of knowledge deals with the techniques themselves and the second set deals with the tools implemented to apply the techniques.
For example, Business Intelligence (BI) is useful in almost all functions of an insurance organization. For this, the organization implements some Business Intelligence software. In order to make effective use of it, a person must first be aware of various BI techniques such as clustering, association rules, etc. A user does not need to know the algorithm used in these techniques, but must be aware of their meaning and use. Learning the functions available in the software implemented for this purpose is relatively easy and can be easily learned through use. But, if you just learn the software and the features available in it and think you can use BI with that knowledge, then it doesn’t work.
In Insurance Organizations, IT Project implementations are regular activities. Project management techniques like CPM/PERT (critical path method/program evaluation and review techniques) help the project team to better manage the project. There are more failure stories in IT implementation projects than success stories. The organization’s IT staff has to work as the interface between internal users and technology partners. Knowledge of project management techniques and the ability to interpret data to turn it into intelligent decisions play an important role in the success of IT projects.
In summary, IT training needs for insurance professionals fall into two categories: one related to techniques and the other to the tools implemented to use those techniques. Training in Business Intelligence techniques, Workflow design, project management techniques, document and knowledge management techniques, etc. they are needed. Tool-specific training is usually provided during implementation. There should be some plan to train more people in tools from those who are already trained. These tools can best be learned by using and practicing them. However, these can be useful only when the user understands the techniques at a practical level.
In addition to these topics, everyone should be fully aware of the organization’s IT policy and information security issues. With properly designed training based on the above considerations, an insurance organization can make better use of information technology.
