New policy systems provide freedom from the tired leg-
acy environment and create excitement about the future,
but IT shops—and business users—realize that even with
modern platforms there is much work left to be done.
By Robert Regis Hyle
Building the
Future
“After you’ve upgraded your sys- tems and spent $20 million—or whatever your particular number happens to be—and decades of
manual effort, where are you going to get your
business value?” asks Mike Fitzgerald, senior
analyst with Celent.
Each year, dozens of insurance carriers
upgrade their platforms in search of a brighter
future, but questions will always remain about
how well the business performs and how long
these modern systems will last.
“The next step with systems is broader
than technology,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s a wider
business issue. How long will these systems
be around? Unfortunately, the newer systems
will be around for 20 or 30 years. This might
change, but people have to have in their mind
that they are going to be living with these
systems for 20 years. Hopefully we get a more
frequent refresh of the technology so we don’t
fall back into the 1980s or 90s, when systems
were left to clunk along. Businesses have to
look at a minimum of 10 years and a maxi-
mum of 20 years.”
Freedom or the Future
“For me, the thought of a newer technology
was more exciting than the freedom from
legacy systems,” says Judith Haddad, executive
vice president and CIO/CTO, Patriot Na-
tional Insurance Group and a member of the
Insurance Technology Association advisory
board. “I don’t think the older technology
was that much of a hardship on IT as it was a
constraint for the business side, but the new
technology is exciting for everyone, especially
in the IT organization.”
A decade ago, it was easy for an insurer to
get excited over a new policy system because
their previous systems, more than likely, were
too rigid to modernize.
“It was tough to make changes; they were
difficult to implement, they were expensive, and
