“The system allows us to work
smarter,” Kruck says. “We can distribute
the task of responding among many
employees, manage communication 24
hours a day, and monitor the timing
of our response. We can easily assign
additional people to the response team if
the need arises.”
Security First Insurance is in the
process of adding text-messaging to the
SMC4 system. The company’s goal is
to support any and all ways customer
content can originate.
“We are building an infrastructure
so that we are here for our customers,
no matter when, no matter what type of
device, and no matter how they want to
communicate with us. Our goal is to be
here when customers need us and not
force them to choose how they interact
with us.”
Mobile Drives ECM Adoption
At the same time insurers have to contend with a growing amount and diversity of content coming from customers,
they need to support new channels by
which customers and employees want to
consume content, such as through mobile devices. Gartner recently predicted
that by 2015, 60 percent of information
workers will be accessing content applications via mobile devices.
“The more mobile we get, the more
content challenges we get,” Carney says.
“For insurers, the question is how to
integrate that mobile channel to what is
ANI is a joint underwriting associ-
ation that writes policies, performs loss
control services, and administers claims
for member companies that provide
insurance capacity. Writing nuclear
liability insurance for nuclear facilities
in the United States, ANI often needs to
communicate with technical staff at its
power-plant customers around key areas
such as loss control.
The company’s traditional way of
providing loss control guidelines and in-
formation was through PDFs. However,
to the most recent version of content,”
Antion says.
ANI addressed larger, enterprise-lev-el content management objectives before
tackling the mobile-access issue. The
company’s enterprise content management (ECM) strategy is based on
leveraging and expanding its use of
SharePoint. Although the system has
been in place for several years, the company faced a challenge in getting users
to incorporate SharePoint into their
content-related routine.
Solving that challenge meant moving
away from technical instruction on the
SharePoint system in favor of stressing
the benefit to employees. “We began
doing training in generic ECM—why
are we doing it, what content defines
us, what’s unique, who uses it, how it’s
used in each department, and ways it
will bring value to the company,” Antion
says. “When you start talking business
value, you get people’s attention.”
ANI also made it easier for inter-
nal staff to use SharePoint by adding
software from harmon.ie to provide
integration with Outlook. With harmon.
ie, users are able to preview documents
directly from SharePoint and to drag-
and-drop files into an email without
needing to download documents from
the server.
“The connection between email
and SharePoint was missing, so people
were having to search for and download
content. Today, some people work out of
harmon.ie and forget that SharePoint is
behind the scenes,” Antion says.
On the development side, add-on
workflow capabilities from SharePoint
allowed ANI to solve what Antion
describes as one of ANI’s most vexing
problems. “We wanted the ability to
move a document from a library in
our engineering site to a library on our
Internet-facing SharePoint server. That
may sound easy, but we couldn’t do it
automatically,” he says.
When ANI engineers write an
inspection report, SharePoint workflows
move those reports through reviews,
update metadata associated with those
“For insurers, the question is how to
integrate that mobile channel to what is
happening within their walls.”
Ellen Carney, Forrester
