Co-incident with the insurance industry's Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (Acord)/Loma conference in Nevada, insurance-industry-specific BPM press releases are hitting the wires. (By the way, LOMA has been around for almost a century and I cannot find the meaning of the acronym; the "L," I believe, stands for life insurance. Anyone that knows, please send me an email or leave a comment.)
Patni announced a new BPM-based framework for insurers. It incorporates Business Process Management (BPM) from Global 360 and Business Rules Management technology from Corticon, as well as Patni's insurance reference model that covers all lines of business. Patni said it chose Global 360 and Corticon because they have been tuned to the insurance industry. Conversely, Patni joined Global 360's partner program.
Pegasystems has followed with a claim servicing package. The new contact center framework, CPM for Insurance, centers around an intent-driven approach with capabilities needed to operate multi-channel, including screens, scripts, processes, scenarios and rules that be modified without additional programming.
The announcements highlight the re-emphasized importance of industry specificity in BPM. After all, early BPM grew out of industries such as insurance and legal. Conversely, BPM is only a late entry in the manufacturing and healthcare delivery space. Increasingly, it will not be enough for a software or service supplier to offer you a one-size-fits-all BPM approach. Instead we expect the most successful BPM suppliers to hone and productize their industry domain expertise just as the ERP and other packaged applications suppliers have done over the last 15 years.
As with the ERP industry 15 years ago, this will be done in partnership with services providers such as Patni. Even one of the biggest services providers, IBM, uses partnerships as illustrated with another BPM-related insurance industry announcement out of Nevada with Thunderhead.
ebizQ plans to follow this trend closely and invites you to provide information about industry-specific BPM products and services for our research file. I can be reached at dennis@ebizq.net.
LOMA = Life Office Management Association