As an insurance carrier executive, how often have you asked for an internal data report only to be told it will take weeks or months and thousands of dollars to develop and cannot be easily modified once it’s done?Executive SummaryData reporting and analysis is often hampered in insurance organizations by siloed functional systems that effectively maintain “disconnects” between data reported for the same policy but for different purposes. A companywide approach to defining and reporting premium and claims for discrete coverages can make it much easier for executives to request and receive data reports for strategic analysis.
For all the advances made in gathering and analyzing data, insurers all too often find themselves constrained by outmoded data structures embedded in legacy systems. The problem is compounded in companies that have multiple systems, which are commonly found in merged organizations and in companies that have grown in an ad hoc fashion.
When policy administration systems reflect functional silos, carriers are often left with two less-than-desirable options for regulatory reporting and strategic analysis:
Manually extracting data into numerous spreadsheets, where managers and specialists work to balance and reconcile data into compatible formats. Writing lines and lines of coding to query, organize and report the requested data—a costly, cumbersome and time-consuming process that produces results that are not easy to maintain or modify.Executives (other than CIOs) generally don’t want to “get into the weeds” of data architecture, but they are well advised to understand that their exposures and losses are not only expressed in the words and numbers of policy forms, rating manuals and declarations.