Comments contributed to article on the complexities of enterprise content management and associated strategies necessary to maintain efficiency and compliance.
1. Property Casualty 360
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers,
click the "Reprints" link at the top of any article.
Upgrading Your ECM: More and Different
Content Creates New Problems
With more and different information being
collected each second by insurance carriers
and the methods in which that content is being
collected also changing rapidly, many
insurance carriers are looking closely at their
enterprise content management (ECM)
systems and the upgrades that may be needed.
Steve Callahan, practice director at the
management consulting firm Robert E. Nolan
Co., points to portals, social networking,
agency automation, and self-service functions
as new ways carriers are employing to collect
data as well as the shift away from paper to
new forms of electronic data.
“This is forcing insurers to take a new look at the mature technologies like workflow and imaging” that
carriers have been using for over a decade, says Callahan. “Those two areas have been around forever, but we
are finding more companies taking a step back into the well-proven realm of optimized workflow and are re-
doing it in the context of some new technology, new processes, new sources of data, and new kinds of data.
They are making an impact.”
When carriers were first introduced to content management, the technology had a great impact in the
number of ways data was being used. That number continues to increase and Callahan maintains carriers are
now studying how the data gets routed.
“They are revamping a good deal of the traditional technology,” he says. “There’s also a geographic
dispersion with remote employees. This is causing people to step back and maybe restructure their approach
to storage and management of data. As changes come in the industry they are revisiting the infrastructure
and looking at different solutions.”
One of the key areas to focus on is unstructured data, which to many people means audio and video files and
photographs, but Callahan points out that some text files also are unstructured and if insurers cut up the
unstructured data pie, text data is the largest portion of the pie followed by images—accident pictures,
inspection pictures of a house—and then audio files, such as recorded reports for claims investigations.
BY ROBERT REGIS HYLE, PROPERTYCASUALTY360.COM
October 17, 2012 • Reprints
Page 1 of 2Upgrading Your ECM: More and Different Content Creates New Problems | PropertyCas...
10/17/2012http://www.propertycasualty360.com/2012/10/17/upgrading-your-ecm-more-and-differen...