Content is everywhere. “One challenge that we grapple with here, as most companies do, is the proliferation of content. Technology is making content available more often, in
more places, and on more devices, but the ability
of companies to effectively manage it is lagging
behind,” says Daniel Antion, vice president
of information services at American Nuclear
Insurers (ANI).
The problem is compounded as the structured
data from insurance production systems and
third- party information providers has collided
with a wealth of unstructured content not housed
in traditional databases.
“There is a tremendous amount of consumption and production of content, and that amount
has continued to accelerate in recent years,” says
Kelley Buchanan, managing director in PwC’s
insurance practice. “The term ‘big data’ may be
the trendy term today, but the truth is that the
big data wave—the sheer volume of information,
its veracity, the velocity at which it is received
and which continues to increase, and its relative
Delivering Value
For insurers, the struggle lies not just in how to
manage all that content from a technical perspective, but how to drive value from it.
“The lines are getting blurry between content
management and analytics,” says Ellen Carney.
“There is a convergence between the two technol-
ogies as insurers struggle to turn all their content
One insurer that is dealing with that con-
vergence is Security First Insurance Company.
The company is applying advanced analytics to
customer communications, starting with the
claims process.
Claims handling is not a simple process, but
for most of the history of insurance, managing
communications in claims was simplified by the
limited number of options customers could work
through—primarily mail, phone, and fax. Today,
however, communication can come through social media, text, mobile, and other channels that
seem to grow and change constantly.
When losses occur, customers expect to be
able to use the channel of their choice to file a
claim. Security First Insurance recognized the
need to not just contend with channel diversity in
claims, but also manage the big data that results
from it.
“We had been systematically looking at ways
customers entered our system—email, phone,
mobile—and buttoning them up technologically so we could respond better,” says Werner E.
Kruck, chief operating officer at Security First
Insurance Company.
Rapid growth in content from new and nontraditional
sources has added a big data element to insurers’ traditional
content management challenges.
By Michael P. Voelker
CONTENT
CHAOS
BLURRED VISION