The Insurance business is primed for (digital) transformation

I was at the ACORD 2016 conference earlier this month, and I have to say I went expecting to hear stories about lots of people struggling with how much unstructured data their organization has, and how hard it was to find. I was not disappointed. Everyone was talking about data challenges, and many of them felt the key to their success or failure hinged on being able to access their organization’s unstructured content. Data accessibility and credibility are essential to providing a world class customer experience. 

Insurance is one of the most data-intensive industries I’ve experienced. Their information comes from unstructured content, much of which is in application silos on legacy systems, and the majority are not customer oriented. This has to change, and the digital transformation that is happening within the insurance industry is orchestrating a new approach to address this. Turning content into actionable information will improve service quality and increase customer retention rates, reduce claims fraud, and enable analytics engines.

What are some of the ways organizations can improve access to their information (including consumption, retention, and transfer)?

• Content standardization to the ISO-approved PDF format, the standard accepted by the industry
• Process automation to help reduce the chances of manual error
• Use of PDF/A for long-term digital preservation

To illustrate, let me outline a common unstructured content use case scenario for insurance:
Contract generation and claims processes: Typically, before a contract is disseminated, it is drafted, reviewed, and approved. Before an invoice is paid, it is captured, reviewed, and approved. In either case, at each stage of the process there is valuable metadata that is needed to record who’s acted on information and what happened. The interesting thing is this key data is typically only maintained and accessible in a particular system, so what happens when this unstructured content leaves that system? Shouldn't that information be within the document itself so that the information is truly transportable? Now, what if we can apply this same process to e-mail or any other application that unstructured content moves in and out from? Only then can information analytics be truly effective!

That’s why I was excited to be at the ACORD 2016 conference and see how many areas of concern our Adlib Elevate™ platform addresses. I really enjoyed watching people’s expressions as I explained how easily all their unstructured information can be analyzed, captured, disseminated, and retained. I have worked in and around insurance for many years and am thrilled to see their progress into the new age of content, where my customers finally see the culmination of all those years of information gathering and now are able use all that data to power business growth and knowledge.