For the insurance industry, the possibilities of embracing change are a reality. The signs are here, the ideas are formulating, leadership is in place, methods and tools are mature and the technology is ready. The shackles of traditional business models, inefficient, ineffective and linear business processes with the misalignment of technology and old legacy systems can finally be removed. The insurance industry is poised and positioned; it’s all around linking the business strategy, with a change in mindset and leveraging enabling process and technology capabilities available in the marketplace and then leveraging the powers of BPM and SOA.
Assuming change is inevitable even in insurance, there are three critical success factors for change in insurance. This list is based on our research around best practices from the market leaders and other industries, there:
·Change must be driven from business rather than technology. So often in insurance, change is driven through technology—. Change must be driven from the business strategy and linked to business processes that are then realized via technology.
·A shift in mindset among business leaders to service-oriented processes. Insurers continue to automate business processes with an old mindset of sequential and linear focusing on the “who” and “how”. Focusing on the “what” sets the stage for re-thinking the business processes allowing for the creation of new business models that are dynamic and flexible.
·BPM and SOA must be viewed as enablers not technology. Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are disciplines of change management that when combined offer powerful solutions to enabling business needs at the pace of business.
Today, there are just a few market leaders across the industry that are flawlessly executing and driving change from the business, with a service-oriented mindset and leveraging BPM and SOA as real enablers, while many are just getting started. The business results to date have been astounding, and as the market leaders continue to invest in change and reach new levels of maturity, a paradigm shift will occur driving a significant gap between the market leaders and the rest of the industry.
This is an excerpt from a recent whitepaper “Insurance: Realizing the Full Potential of Change Shifting the mindset to create dynamic business models by leveraging BPM and SOA as true enablers” authored by Deb Smallwood & Cindy Maike, Co-founders of Smallwood Maike & Associates and published and sponsored by IBM. Contact Deb Smallwood at dsmallwood@smallwoodmaike.com for a copy.
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