Webinars

How Insurers Can Increase Agility and Innovation While Keeping Costs Down

Date: March 25, 2008

Time: 12:00 pm US Eastern

All dates and times are NY local time, please consult your favorite world clock to determine when this webinar takes place in your time zone.

Featured Speakers:

Deborah Smallwood, Co Founder, SMA (bio)
Akshay Sabhikihi, Program Director, Industry SOA, IBM (bio)

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Moderator:

Beth Gold-Bernstein

Sponsored By:

Insurers today face a difficult struggle to streamline their business processes and keep costs down — all while differentiating their products, keeping their customers happy and maintaining independent agent loyalty in a fiercely competitive market. Consumers are demanding high service levels 24x7, across all communication channels. Business leaders have reported that their success depends on how innovative they can be in their response to market demands. Their ability to adapt and change can make or break their ability to drive this type of innovation. They need a vision for where their IT strategy needs to head and drive it there.

This session will discuss the level of innovation that dynamic business applications can drive to accelerate process flexibility. We will examine what it takes to stay competitive — and to stay in business — and discuss specifically what solutions insurance companies need to consider. In addition, we'll share one very specific solution designed to help you create a level of responsiveness you didn't think possible with your existing property and casualty processes that are often hard to implement, support and maintain.

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Featured Speaker Bios:

Top insurance industry adviser Deborah Smallwood is ebizQ's Insurance Community Manager. Deb's focus is on transforming insurance companies into agile, business-driven enterprises where IT enables business value.

As Community Manager, SMA, Inc will blog and podcast to keep the ebizQ community fully informed on the latest news and breakthroughs relevant to insurance. They will also be responsible for publishing press releases, covering briefings, writing feature articles and sourcing content from other analysts, industry associations and vendors for publication on ebizQ. Finally, each week, they will compile the most important news and views in an e-mail newsletter for ebizQ's ever-growing insurance community.

Focusing on the needs and challenges of today's insurance world, SMA, Inc is a strategic advisory firm that offers a unique blend of research, advisory and consulting services for both insurance companies and solution providers. By leveraging best practices from both the management consulting and research advisory disciplines, SMA's service offerings are prime for companies eager and ready to embrace change and achieve their full business potential.

As Founder of SMA, Inc, Deborah Smallwood has held leadership roles with Liberty Mutual, KPMG LLP, and TowerGroup, where she consistently found new ways to leverage technology in achieving optimal business performance. Her skill set includes business strategy, the development of business and IT roadmaps, and the delivery of application software. Prior to Smallwood Maike, Deb served as Chief Transformation Officer (CTO) for a P&C, mid-tier regional carrier and was the Managing Director of the Insurance Practice at TowerGroup.

Partner, Karen Furtado brings a wealth of industry knowledge to SMA. She spent 25 years at CGI, focused in insurance. Her specific areas of expertise include product development, complex system implementations, vendor selection processes, project management and business and IT outsourcing services. Her passion is working with both technology providers and carriers to deliver high-value solutions for core issues facing the industry. Karen actively participates as an industry speaker.

Akshay Sabhikhi is the Program Director for Industry SOA for IBM Software Group. He leads product management for a business unit that is responsible for driving IBM’s strategy and growth around industry-specific SOA middleware products and services.

Prior to his current position at IBM, Mr. Sabhikhi served as Director of Products for Webify Solutions Inc., where he drove product strategy and execution that built Webify as a leader in industry-specific SOA software leading to its acquisition by IBM in August 2006.

Mr. Sabhikhi is accomplished software professional who has held multiple roles in the enterprise software industry with a strong focus on financial services markets. Prior to Webify, Akshay managed products for Trilogy Software Inc. within the financial services business unit. He holds a Masters in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA. He also holds an Acton MBA in Entrepreneurship from the Acton MBA School in Austin, Texas.

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