Gregory Maciag

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Delicious Data

This is the first time I ever saw data standards called “delicious”. The Washington Watch blog used the word in a piece on the DATA [Digital Accountability and Transparency] Act, saying that while they support the Act, “those delicious data standards” and mandatory publication of data by agencies is more important than a new board of officials.

In the abstract, standards wrapped in laws are all you need. In reality, standards need people to build, maintain and extend them. Designing a good set of data standards is not a once-and-for-all task. Rather than setting some best practice in stone, we're directing a continuous and complex research, negotiation and publication process that's embedded in the real-world needs of a diverse community.

Delicious Data and GSA Scandal

Standards Organizations

I like this thought from Michelle Marlborough:  “It seems that the need for a new standard is partly driven by desperation – a realization that we are in a bit of a mess. The process of development of a consensus-based standard is then, by necessity, a long and slow process. And so we find ourselves in a bit of a bigger mess and with a mammoth task of implementing the standard and unraveling the already created mess.”

I've seen this pattern repeat itself many times. One of the aims of standards organizations must be to abstract the “despair” phase and to smooth the “unraveling” phase. So, we must make people aware of their need for standards so that they don't have to experience despair.

We can do this by drawing their attention to standards successes in other fields of endeavor and bringing the real costs of “mess” to life. In the standards creation and implementation phase, we need to provide facilitation so that the wood and the trees come into focus, and so that progress is captured and built on.  Geeks Talk Clinical

 

Electronic Health Records and EHR Standards

Arjen Westerink asks: “What it will take to encourage EHR [electronic health record] vendors to develop truly interoperable EHRs?” Collaboration and competition seem to be irreconcilable forces. “So far, there is little financial incentive to support true interoperability, and if anything, many vendors see some level of proprietary distinction as desirable – creating barriers to customer defection,” he writes.

He asks whether government should stimulate standards or whether the industry should wait for standards to emerge. The problem with this, as I see it, is that the industry can't hang around waiting for either eventuality. In particular, I don't believe that industry standards emerge by themselves any more. The kind of de facto industry standard that we used to see in, say, punch cards, was driven by closed intellectual property - patents and copyrights. That's not going to happen in healthcare data standards, and any organization nurturing the idea that it can produce a proprietary standard that will be taken up by the industry is kidding itself.

Data professionals in the healthcare industry need to get together and create standards. They need them for the growth of the industry. Trying to establish islands of dominance is not a tenable strategy. To do so is to fight yesterday's battles instead of building a bright tomorrow. Interoperability is coming – so bring it on.

Health Management Technology

Thanks!

The staff of both ACORD and LOMA want to thank you for attending the ACORD-LOMA Insurance Systems Forum in Orlando last week.

 

Telematics

Good quotes from Marcia Bernier on ACORD's development of standards in telematics, as reported at the 2012 Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Conference (ICTC). The article also contains interesting comments from Sandy Dunn at Wunelli, who is launching a UK-based telematics standards initiative: “Insurers have a small window of opportunity to agree to a common data standard. As an industry we need to grasp the opportunity now, while telematics is still in its infancy in the UK, or we will find ourselves facing the same issues insurers faced, for example, in sharing 'No Claims Discount' information.”

I echo this but add: think wider than UK. We can get this right for the entire industry and save everybody time and money. At the very least, UK-based insurers will want a standard that works across Europe and, increasingly, globally.

For a contrary view, check out the comments from Insurethebox's Mike Brockman in Insurance Times. He makes a “competitive advantage” argument for non-standardization. Hmm. I'm getting visions of the Sony memory stick. (Don't remember the Sony memory stick...? My point exactly.)

The Intersection

Insurance Times

Cost of Poor Data Management

Experian notes an important cost of poor data management that is usually overlooked: distracted management attention. It's well known that poor data management can result in poor decisions, but it's less widely appreciated that it can also undermine decision timelines and distort the scope of decisions. (These are my terms, by the way, which I offer in addition to the comments in the Experian piece.)

I wonder also if we've become too comfortable with the idea of information overload. Since we all know there's lots and lots of data washing around our world, no one's going to yell at us if we're not on top of it. Being distracted by data issues is an acceptable form of distraction. I'm not saying that anyone consciously treats data management as a scapegoat in this way, but nevertheless it happens.

We have to remember that it's not data we need, it's relevant data. Data management is the discipline that specializes in relevance.  Cost

Texting for Agencies

Clients are increasingly texting their agents and preferring to receive texts from their agents, creating the challenge as to how agencies manage this form of communication. In this article, the author discusses the challenges agencies face with texting, how agents can send texts to their email to document the conversation and how agents can use their email to send texts to their clients who prefer this method of communication. We are hopeful that more efficient ways to attach texts to agency management systems and to send texts from these systems will be developed in the future.   Download Texting For Insurance Agencies

Realtime & Download Survey Results

The Real Time/Download Campaign was founded to champion the adoption of Real Time and Download for independent insurance agencies and companies. Real Time provides agencies with a consistent workflow through agency management systems or comparative raters when doing business with multiple carriers.  Here is a copy of the Survey.  Download Agency Survey Report

Data Standards - How Global Can We Go?

ACORD's Shane McCullough and Lloyd Chumbley meet with Carrie Burns (Insurance Networking News) to talk about driving change in standards-setting and implementation.

Download INN Data Standards - How Global Can We Go

 

Insurance Data & Analytics Summit New York

ACORD and Reactions Magazine launched the new IDA Summit in New York City on April 25th. If you did not attend, please plan to do so next year.  We will keep you posted on the dates. Here is the agenda and copies of the presentations.

 

 

 

Download IDA Agenda 

Download Reinsurance eBusiness

Download Tom Paparatto RMS

Download Richard Hoehne IBM

Download Ajay Bhargava TATA

Download Forrester

 

Meet the Brick

Soon, everything that's produced - and some consumers - will have a standard identifier. The standard is called the GS1 Global Product Classification, and its base level is known as a brick. Common Identifier

Big Data v Lot's of Data

It's a small word, but it's being misused. What does the “big” in big data mean?

Figures similar to the following are coming to a slide show near you: “It has been estimated that Wal-Mart records more than 1 million customer transactions each hour, resulting in more than 2.5 petabytes of data being stored, the equivalent of 167 times the data stored in the Library of Congress. Facebook is reported to store 40 billion photographs. And an estimated 35 hours of video content is uploaded to YouTube every minute.”

This is interesting stuff, but it mixes apples and oranges. WalMart cranks out a lot of data – but it's structured data. We're talking about a lot of small things. But pictures and video are another matter. These are large, unstructured data objects – what I'd call genuine big data.

Genuine big data poses novel problems of interpretation and combination. Pseudo big data – that is, large transaction volumes – might tax the processing capabilities of traditional databases, but it doesn't challenge the analysis model in the same way as unstructured data does.

So, when someone raises the problems of big data, it's worth asking whether they're talking about high volumes of structured data, unstructured data, or both. These are different topics and they call for different strategies.  Big Data

 

Standards News from the London Market

Updates on Electronic Claims and Standardization in London.

Download ECF news Apr12PUB

Download LMG News Apr12PUB

 

Metrics for Industry Standards

Here is a copy of the most recent tech Focus column on Metrics that we published.

Download ID 2012-04 Tech Focus

Data Standards Competition

Michael Shashoua of Inside Reference Data asks a good question about competition between data standards. His focus is the financial services domain, but the question can be adapted to any other sector: “[W]hich approach is the right way to go for data standards modeling? Is it emphasizing organization or classification by asset class? Or is it linking the proverbial alphabet soup of acronym-named formats together?”

Shashoua is here contrasting the Open Data Model (ODM) with the Financial Industry Business Ontology (Fibo). He invites readers' comments, and I guess many will respond along the lines of “it depends...”

If you're modeling a piece of business as a way of understanding it, scoping a project or building a multi-disciplinary team, then the ODM's asset class view will be helpful. If you're looking to bring interoperability to processes and systems, the Fibo view will be helpful.

At ACORD we're convinced that people will always need multiple, related views. You can't force a single perspective on to all users and audiences. The ACORD Framework therefore contains different, linked models that we call facets. These enable access to the insurance domain from different viewpoints.

There's a meta-question underlying Shashoua's question, which is: Should standards compete? My answer would be that different approaches to a single standard should indeed compete, but that single standards should not themselves compete with each other. In other words, encourage debate and diversity within the standard setting process.

Data Standards Competition

Electronic Medical records

An artcile written by Chris Taylor talks about electronic medical records.  In it, he says: "There are few more personal, passionate, and political topics than health care. The reasons for this are clear: Health care spending has reached 17% of the U.S. GDP, outcomes are worse (partly due to  American lifestyle issues in my opinion) than in other developed countries, and an attempt to fix the system through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) now sits in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. But regardless of ACA's legal prognosis, the Pandora's Box of true health care reform has already been opened — and it happened before most of us realized."

Download The Health Care Reform That Can't Be Stopped 

Data Visualization

Do people visualize data? This is a question that's never asked because the answer is supposedly self-evident. Of course people visualize data! That's why they draw pie charts and bar graphs. Duh.

However, I think there's a limit to how far people can visualize data – and this is a human limit, not a technological one. At a certain point, visualization cannot help us any more. It concerns me that efforts designed to bring greater visualization to data might be better devoted to other activities.

What's the largest number you can comfortably visualize? I'd guess it's twelve, which you can see as the spots on a pair of dice. Anything more than a dozen or so and your brain gives you a fuzzy picture labeled “lots”.

Then there's relationships between things. Two things joined by a single relationship is pretty easy to visualize. So is a triangular relationship. After that, it gets tricky. Sure, you can visualize a polygon with any number of sides or cross-wiring between the vertices. But can you remember what each relationship means? That's not so easy.

William Gibson's cyberpunk vision of an immersive world of data was seductive, but it's not reality. You remember, in Gibson's future people jacked into the net and could then experience data as a kind of tangible environment. Today we have tools that allow us to plot all kinds of structures and graphics from data. We can fly over terrains built entirely from abstract data. The problem is, we learn nothing by it.

In fact, we learn most precisely where data visualization fails us. We realize the enormity of an effect when it's off the scale. We innovate when we think outside of the box. We have insights when our data delivers patterns we've never seen before, and which force us to ask new questions about the business.  Greater data visualization isn't going to bring significant breakthroughs. Human vision will.  Visualization

ACORD Board Aligns Plan with Vision

The ACORD Board of Directors met this month to review 2012 Plans and the 2020 Vision. The journey almost always begins with current plans and budgets.  We've been working on our agile standards development project to streamline the process.  We need to speed standards to market with a long range goal of distributing plug and play deliverables that require little if any tweaking for implementation.  Software components are in the planning stage.  We are also exploring web services as an emerging channel for the distribution and use of industry standards as well.  

We are creating a new standards development platform to replace the various databases and processes accumulated over the years from different sources. The platform will use the ACORD Framework (i.e. Models) in order to harmonize all aspects of the process.  We will be creating a client portal for use by developers for consuming standards into the enterprise. Our models and a streamlined platform will make it easier for us to focus on the distribution of implementation tools. We are planning for a tool to translate ACORD standards for example. 

An ACORD Forms portal is also in the plan to expedite updates and better inform users of agency systems.  Testing and certification will get the additional rigor required to support trading partners.  It works well in London and v2 will be expanded to include other lines of business.  We're also looking at how we can support mobile applications, some of which are already in use today.

Finally, we will continue our goal of seeking partnerships with industry organizations and continue advocacy for industry standards. Such collaboration will get us involved in eSignatures, Single Sign-on Passwords, ePolicy delivery and more.  And we have engaged a firm to work with us on both industry and organizational Metrics and plan to deliver new insights and tools for members to measure the seemingly illusive value of industry standards in large scale development projects. 

Thank you for your continued support of this industry effort.  Let me know your thoughts as your feedback will help us shape this vision to better meet your needs.

Open Data Standards???

I'm all for open standards, I'm all for data standards. I'm not so sure about the Open Data Standards initiative.

I see what they're trying to do. Set up in Finland in 2011, the Open Data Standards Association is a not-for-profit foundation whose “goal is to ease the practical exchange of information assets on the internet for any commercial or non-commercial use and independent of a target audience”.

The Association is publishing a hierarchy of definitions. I stumbled into the collection at “bungee jumping”, which I was surprised to see defined as a type of place rather than an activity. This is to do with the role it plays in a hierarchy of places differentiated by usage.

My concern is that by being “independent of a target audience”, the Open Data Standards will not serve any particular community. There is undoubtedly an audience for data standards around, say, types of publicly usable building structures, but I would say that this audience should be driving such standards.  Open Standards

Social Media: Cover the Risks

Social media seems to have taken over the world.  This statement is not hyperbole. Think Facebook. Read our OpEd from Insurance Day.  Download ID2012-03SocialMedia

 

Millennial's Take on Social Media

Jeff Yates (ACT) said that he was always looking to get the upcoming generations’ take on the technology trends.  I thought you would particularly enjoy this month’s ACT article written by Lauren Foy who is a sophomore at the University of Rhode Island.  Her article is an expanded version of an email she wrote to her dad, Mike Foy, an independent agent and active industry participant.

Download ACT Article Millennial'sTake Social Media

 

Standards Must Be Inclusive

"External operational risk data consortiums are evolving, but not all in the same direction – and significant differences of opinion remain about what consortiums should be doing. Consortiums disagree over what sort of loss events should be recorded, what information should be collected on each one, and whether data needs to be manipulated to keep it relevant to different-sized companies. And they are questioning what the fundamental purpose of external data should be – for operational risk management primarily, or for measurement and modelling as well."

Loss consortiums deal with big numbers, but that doesn't mean the concepts they deal in are necessarily complex. There are two issues in the controversy outlined in this quote. The first is that different players in an industry disagree about what needs to be measured, and how it should be measured. The second is that people are unsure of “the fundamental purpose” of data.

 Let me deal with the latter issue first. There is no “fundamental purpose” to any data. Data are designed entities that provide answers to questions. Every piece of data owes its existence to a prior enquiry. The idea that data has a life independent of such enquiries is wrong. Disputes about “fundamental purpose” must, then, really be about whose form of enquiry takes precedence in the design of a data scheme.

This takes us neatly back to the first issue – the what and how of data. Now, if consortiums have differences of opinion over what information needs to be recorded, this suggests first that their business models consume and/or produce information in different ways, and second that they need to share data. (Otherwise, why would they be arguing? You hold your data, I hold mine – who would care about whether or not we were compatible?)

So, in the interests of trade, any standard needs to embrace every possible usage of a data item. Standards have to be inclusive. It makes no sense to trim standards, even though the further you get to the periphery of the standards set, the fewer users you will find. If you fail to serve the periphery, you lose trade at the core.

Think of it this way. Say we're building a shopping mall. We agree quickly that we need a parking lot and elevators. Some people in the management committee want there to be special parent-and-child parking slots. This is going to make the parking lot a little more expensive. They'd also like wider elevators, so that moms can get their double strollers in – that's going to cost a lot more.

Do you abandon this section of the customer community just because their needs are different from those of the majority? They're going to spend money in your mall. They might be the best customers your mall has.

To summarize, I say that standards bodies are well advised to take the time to be inclusive, rather than waste energy arguing about what should be excluded. I also say that data has no “fundamental purpose”. People have purposes – data has destinations.

Loss Data Consortiums

Data as a Real Asset

What kind of a resource is data? I think we all give honor to the idea that data is an asset to business and the lifeblood of industry, commerce and government. But I also think that the way we treat data reveals that we see it as a much more lowly commodity. We treat it as an undifferentiated mass to be mined and refined. We treat it as a residue that builds up in our organizations and threatens to bring their mechanisms to a grinding halt. We treat it as by-product of the real business – a trail left by transactions. And we treat it as a product that isn't safe to destroy in case we might need to use it again one day.

Organizations and individuals are drowning in data but starved of intelligence. The more data the world generates, the more frustrating this situation is. How come we don't know our customers better? How come we can't model and mitigate against risks better? How come we can't get different parties collaborating effectively across their domains of expertise? With all this data – and all this “rich data” and “big data” – we ought to be forging ahead on all fronts.

If organizations focused more on defining their questions, then they'd gather less, but more salient, data. They'd be able to distinguish between data that's left behind by transactions and data that's actively sought by the business. They'd be able to construct meaningful retention policies. Above all, they'd be able to put real business values on their data. They'd know what their data was worth and what it cost to acquire.  This approach is a more faithful enactment of the idea that data is an asset. Assets are acquired knowingly and retained intentionally.

Now, I agree that in some circumstances one person's data by-product is another person's vital input. One example is a broker gathering data about clients and coverage and sells it back to the underwriters.  I suspect this is the kind of collaborative opportunity that will make the promise of big data real.  

Data is inert. Information doesn't want to be free – it doesn't want anything. Data does not wander around the net looking for other data to make beautiful music with. Armed with interesting questions, people can get a lot out of data. Let's stop expecting tools to spontaneously deliver data-based breakthroughs. Let's not kid ourselves that staring at spreadsheets and plotting graphs will reveal answers for questions we haven't framed. Let's create those questions, and ask them.

Standards Value

“[Carol] Rozwell [research vice president, life sciences, Gartner] recently used Gartner models and her own estimates to calculate what process improvements and data standards might save the industry: $5.8 to $6.6 billion annually. That is the entire R&D budget of a large pharma.”

I'll let those numbers speak for themselves. But note how process improvements and data standards go together hand-in-glove in Rozwell's prescription. You need to change the way you do things, and you need standards, and you need standards to change the way you do things.

Gartner on IT Trends

ACORD Newsletters

Here are three PDF documents of ACORD Newsletters from September 2011 to March 2012. I divided them by line of business and architecture.

Download 2012-04 News - Framework

Download 2012-04 News - L&A

Download 2012-04 News - P&C

Download 2012-04 News - Reinsurance

Time to Standardlize

Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are a great idea. These exchanges enable health care organizations to share patient data, cutting down on storage costs, record losses and all the other problems associated with traveling paper files.

But not every health care organization can afford to join a HIE. Now, “afford” is one of those relative terms, so what these executives are saying is that they have other priorities than funding HIE membership. However, from my perspective as a standards guy, I can tell you one reason why HIEs might be too expensive for all their potential members: that's right, there's no industry data standard.

Different states have different data solutions. In November 2011, a group of vendors and state officials launched a standards and interoperability group which will attack the problem.

I'm not saying “I told you so”. Every new area of information sharing must be allowed to develop according to market needs. This inevitably means duplication of effort and transactional friction. I don't think you can mandate a standard ahead of time. The key point is that industry leaders must step in as soon as the friction is apparent to everyone involved, and push for standards.

The electronic health record (EHR) may turn out to be the most significant information product since the Gutenberg bible. I'm encouraged that the health industry is investing its expertise and attention on the standards issue now, while EHRs are in their youth.

Health Care IT

Standards Matter: Customer Engagement

 

Standards by Exchange

I get a strong sense of deja vu reading about the elusiveness of data standards in the investment advisory industry. Industry insider David Fetter says: “The source-of-record data custodians have conventions they implemented many years ago, and their systems would have to be rewritten to comply with new standards”. The way around this is data exchanges – hubs that mediate between proprietary systems.

Data exchanges work by implementing standards on behalf of a community. An exchange basically uses a standard to translate between different languages. The transacting parties save time, money and disruption by continuing with their existing systems but gain trading access to the whole community.

It's interesting to see exchanges described as an alternative to standards when they are actually implementations of standards. An exchange is a community-based standardization effort. An exchange may be easier to fund and grow than a standardization initiative based on collaboration among leading players. This is a valid way for an industry to evolve.

Exchanges can also reduce some of the complexity of exchanging information with value added services.  But we are keen to make it easier for developers to consume ACORD Standards into their systems as well.  And by doing so, Exchanges will also need to evolve value propositions. All too often, intermediaries of all sorts do nothing more than capitalize on the inefficiency of a business or market that should not exist in the first place.  Let's spend money on innovation.  Data Standards Elusive

Just 1 Campaign - Healthcare Standards

Just-1 is the name of a new campaign to promote the use of the 13-digit Global Location Number (GLN) in the healthcare sector. The idea is that just using this one simple standard will bring major benefits to the industry – and to patient safety: “Just one validated GLN is all a hospital or healthcare provider will need to begin issuing purchase orders electronically under the GS1 standard.

GLNs may then be encoded in a GS1 bar code and used to identify ship-to, bill-to and purchased-from information, among other functional data and locations. This will help bring healthcare providers up to the same standard of efficiency and accuracy already achieved in other sectors of the economy, such as retail and grocery stores.” The code can also be used to identify other entities including parties and devices.

Successful data standards grow from the urgent needs of the communities they serve. The major business benefit of any standard lies in the acceptance of its core elements. The 80/20 rule plays a part here, in that a small number of elements tend to supply the larger part of the benefits. However, success in the core area also leads to reprioritization of more peripheral areas. Once organizations in healthcare are working happily with the GLN, they'll come to see value in other standards as well.

HSCA President Talks Standards

Big Data Standards

Chuck Romine, the new head of the IT Lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), says the agency's priorities for the coming year are big data, cloud computing, mobility, and cybersecurity. Cybersecurity is an area where government leadership can bring benefits across the board. The other priority areas are, I guess, places where significant government activity creates an interest in standardization.

But what kind of standards are we looking for in big data, cloud computing, and mobility? I believe the key driver for standards in cloud and mobile computing is avoidance of lock-in. Users want to be able to shift their data and applications across storage solutions and networks without having to make major structural changes. The driver for standards in big data is less clear to me.

That may be because “big data” is such a catch-all term. For me, the term implies that there's some intuitive, but not obvious, common structural features that unites a mass of data from different sources. So, if I have a ton of data collated from the web, email, CCTV cameras and recorded phone conversations, perhaps there are inferences I can make about the behavior of groups from the shadows left by individuals on these various systems.

It seems to me that standards for big data need to emerge from the business domains to which such data sets belong. I'm struggling to think of an overriding, independent sense in which “standards for big data” have any relevance.

Perhaps I'm looking too deep. Maybe NIST's guidance on big data will be around the need for those agencies contributing source data to conform with existing industry standards. In this case, big data represents a new opportunity to educate collaborators on the value of standards, rather than a new field of standards per se.  Big Data Standards

Big Data and the Intelligence Community

Nate Crochunis writes a good piece on the opportunities and problems of big data in the intelligence community. Better tools for sharing and searching information will help analysts spot threats amid the huge flows of data they collect. "By implementing data standards and tagging, the information can become more searchable, easier to identify and easier to share,” he says.

This isn't as straightforward a task as it sounds. In regular business, or in government, when we want to share data better we sit knowledgeable representatives together and ask them to define the major concepts that make up their world. We then add as much detail as required to get them sharing examples of these concepts effectively. I don't see how this is possible in the intelligence world.

There's a trivial reason and a deep reason why this is so. The trivial reason is that people plotting crimes tend to disguise the subject matter of their conversations. The deep reason is that the terrorist mind, while not being super-human, is different than the non-terrorist mind. Terrorists see a different world. Figuring out their data architecture from the outside is very, very hard. Cold war strategies or separatist movements were relatively straightforward to model. The threats of today and tomorrow are much more elusive.

I'm not saying we should give up trying to extract intelligence from data. But I would propose an approach that's different from the normal industry standardization processes. In the standards that ACORD administers on behalf of the global insurance industry, we look for compromise and flexibility within the greatest possible commonality. This gives us the economies we seek as an industry without eroding the differences we treasure as individual players. I suggest that the intelligence community needs to invert this approach. Instead of building a model that encourages compatibility, promote a plethora of models that invite competitive evaluation.

As a start, I suggest that automatic analysis of large data sets be used to propose potential entities and relationships – a kind of dumb, bottom-up modeling. I'm sure this is already done routinely for the cracking of surface codes and the identification of key nodes in human networks. But I would extend the principle so that multiple bottom-up models are maintained in parallel, and that it's these multiples that are shared across agencies.

This advice may come as a surprise. The process I advocate defers expert human intervention to the latest possible stages of analysis. It's a process of listening rather than talking. Standards are a way of codifying judgment – of making best practice concrete. The intelligence community needs to suspend judgment and to consider the alternate realities suggested by dispassionate cuts of the data available to them. The standard should be – no standard.  See Big Data

What's Happening in London

Here is a copy of the Lloyd's Market Association Viewpoint as well as the Bluffers Guide to Modernisation in the London Market.  Viewpoint (November 2011)

Bluffers Guide to Market Modernisation London Market

Endorsements Initiative

ECF Supplement

Agents & Brokers Continue to Design the Future

Jeff Yates, Executive Director of ACT says "This is an exciting time to be involved in ACT because we have so many future oriented initiatives underway. What are the key consumer, technology and business trends that will impact our future?

What will the agencies of the future look like and what will the attributes be for the most successful agency managers? How will the expectations of our clients change and how will they expect us to communicate with them? How will insurance processes change in an increasingly mobile world, opening up new ways to communicate among consumers, agents, carriers and other business partners?

How will agency automation and agent-carrier interfaces continue to evolve, so that we can automate more of the routine processes and free up time for agents to be trusted advisors to their clients – the true “value add” that independent agents provide?

Download Opportunities in Times of Change By Jeff Yates

Customer Expectations Rise in Realtime World

Confirmation of the key role of data standards in modern commerce continues to come from across the spectrum. I just found an insightful article about how vital data standards are in the car repair and maintenance world.

According to Bob Moore, auto repair shops don't just rely on the internet for parts ordering. They also use the web for research and product comparison. To compare prices and features, you need standard data definitions.

There's a real urgency to this because the repair folks aren't just trying to improve efficiency for its own sake. They've got customers standing in front of them who have already done their own research. If repairers are not at least on the same page – and hopefully a couple of chapters ahead – they're going to lose out. You can't just phone a bunch of suppliers and get back to the customer with a quote. You've got to respond in real time, and you've got to be able to explain all the solutions you've rejected.  Insurance Brokers take note!

Content is King

Ink

Did you know... the ancient Egyptians wrote with black ink on papyrus, but used red ink for important passages – and debits. This information presentation standard is five thousand years old.

Standards Matter: Think Airlines

 

Standards From The Start... Please!

Here's a succinct and heartfelt appeal for developers to incorporate data standards right from the start of their work. Gary at Master Data Management writes on his blog that systems are still being designed and implemented with little regard to the accessibility or utility of the data later on down the line.

“Data management is often considered a technical task – because the mess that has been created from years of neglect can be technically challenging to resolve,” he says. This is right on the money. Standards are a business tool, because without them the enterprise generates technical issues and barriers to business performance.  Data Management from the Beginning

Counting Rooms - Standards?

The real estate industry is set to adopt data standards, bringing consistency to the 900 or so listing agencies across the US. To date, the industry has lacked standards covering key business concepts – such as how many bathrooms a property has. Without a common standard, buyers can't compare houses.

The agreed standard includes four numeric fields for types of bathroom, plus a “baths total” figure. This means that agencies can continue with their own methods for presenting the total figure, while also giving the basic data others can use to construct their own totals.

So, you could get a house with "baths full"=4, "baths half"=2, "baths three-quarter"=3 and "baths one-quarter"=2, and "baths total" of 11 or 7 or any other number depending on agency preference.

Okay, that's probably more information about bathrooms than you wanted. But it's a good example of industry players coming together to serve their common needs while protecting competitivity.

Data Dictionary

A New Agency Social Media Survey

Jason Hoeppner from B.H. Burke &Co, said that when he speaks with an agency owner, COO, or marketing manager about social media, I get asked about the results other agencies are seeing, in particular their return on investment (ROI). (I’m sure for the most part they’re seeking this information to help them make an informed decision on whether to invest in these new marketing methods, but I sometimes suspect it may also be a defensive question to justify not delving into the topic further.)

As a result of lacking good solid data to provide an answer, I decided to put together this survey to learn what industry people were doing in online marketing with social media. I’m not making any recommendations in this report, just presenting the results for you to use as you see fit. With that being said, the following three findings were the most eye-opening to me... READ MORE in Social Media Survey - B.H.Burke & Co. Feb 2012

New Case Study

Catch a great slideshow on ACORD, the Open Group and Standard Insurance, including a case study on new business setup for group term life insurance at ArchiMate

Real Time Saves (Makes) Money

Real Time is the ability to click on a button from a client file in the agency management system or comparative rater for immediate access to carrier information on that client. The transaction may be a quote, billing inquiry, claim inquiry/loss runs, policy view, endorsements or a request for information.

This approach provides a single workflow for servicing or quoting with multiple carriers. The Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America created the Agents Council on Technology in 1999 to encourage independent agencies and carriers to enhance their productivity and competitiveness by using the latest technologies and most efficient workflows. Likewise, agency system user groups have worked with ACORD in a coalition named AUGIE (ACORD-User Groups Information Exchange). Both these groups came together to lead the Real Time campaign, supported by carriers, solution providers and independent agent associations, striving to encourage standardised and streamlined workflows.

This industry campaign is intended to educate key agency system leaders about the benefits of using Real Time and Download (carrier data in bulk sent to update agency systems). 

READ MORE..... Download Insurance Day 18JAN2012

Good Definitions

A web page based on information published in 1996 contains some of the best FAQs about data standards around. The page is ultimately oriented toward image management in education and the cultural industries, but you don't need to read that far. One of the features I like is the writers' succinct discussion of the differences between standards, conventions and guidelines.

VRA

Cooperation Without Standards?

“Imagine the Rockefeller Center ice rink. There are no rules, regulations, signs, segregation or other devices that try to control people's movements, but it works. People see and react to others. Human nature reigns, and people are free to move about however they like. No one kind of ice skater has priority over anyone else and collisions are low speed and very rare.”

The example of the ice rink, mentioned here by Sam Goater writing in the Hartford Courant, is a story associated with the “shared space” approach to traffic planning. The idea is you take away complex street design, and let road users negotiate their own paths.

What does this mean for standards? On the face of it, it might suggest that if we leave businesses to interact with each other, they'll do a decent enough job, and we can forget about directing their efforts.

Three things. First, shared space solutions don't suspend all the rules of the road, but only those additional design features originally implemented to improve flow. You still have to drive on the correct side of the road and if you're on foot you still need to look out for vehicles. The all-directions crosswalk introduced at the Oxford Circus junction in the heart of London is often described as a shared space project, but it's also strictly controlled by countdown lights. It's not a free-for-all.

Second, business to business processes are aspects of relationships, but cars aren't. The vehicles flowing through a road system are not analogous to data. They don't mean anything. They don't have anything to do with each other apart from their brief competition for road space. It's not as if the final destination of a car trip has to interpret the car. And consume the car. And take action based on the car. And justify its action to a regulator.

Finally, ice skaters are intelligent agents, as are drivers. Each player involved in one of these shared spaces has a stake in surviving in one piece. Not so with data, which is inert.

I think what's going on with shared space solutions is a return of responsibility to the individual. People can negotiate their own circuit of the rink – and it's more fun than being marshalled. De-cluttered road junctions force drivers to be more alert and aware of other road users, which can only be a good thing. But shared space principles don't translate to business communications. In business, lack of appropriate standards leads either to a plethora of expensive, rigid point solutions, or anarchy.

Shared Space

Consumer Electronics Show 2012

Some of the new devices showcased at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) go beyond cool – they point to potentially substantial benefits. One such is a hand-cranked tablet. I like the idea of anything that doesn't need a charger and can see the benefit to kids in the developing world. But I'm also struck by the implication that power requirements for handheld devices must be tumbling. Battery life is the major issue with mobile devices – I'd put it ahead of network coverage. My Kindle gives weeks of use on one charge, thanks to its low-energy electronic ink screen. I know electronic ink isn't appropriate for every application, but it will nevertheless have a hand in raising people's expectations of other types of devices.

The show also saw announcements of new tabletop gene sequencers that can bring down the cost of running a whole-person genome to $1,000 or even $500. These machines are becoming more affordable to researchers, and as the technology develops we can't be far from the point where it starts appearing in doctors' offices. The insurance industry will be taking a keen interest in how this market pans out.

Hand-Cranked Tablet

Genome

Device Growth

The Consumer Electronics Association says that the biggest growth in device sales in 2011 were for tablets (up 222%) and smartphones (up 58%). They forecast 2012 growth of 59% and 22% respectively.

Of these two device types, smartphones have been around longer. They've traditionally been a high-end sale, and that market is reaching saturation (as are 3G networks). We're likely to see lower-cost smartphones emerging as suppliers try to enlarge the market. The upshot is that mobile apps are going to be a permanent feature of our lives and enhanced information services are going to be taken for granted by customers.

I wouldn't want to take bets on the tablet market. Apple's achievement with the iPad is remarkable but I guess we'd all feel more comfortable if it had some serious competitors. I'll be watching Amazon's progress with interest here – just as I'll be keeping an eye on Google.

Global Gadgets Biz

Model Insurer

A new report from Celent highlights the use of industry data standards as a prominent best practice. According to Celent Model Insurer Asia 2012: “Model Insurers understand that they need to think beyond successful point solutions and create lasting systems that work within a larger infrastructure.

Using data standards means that an insurer avoids reinventing the wheel and instead manages risk by working with accepted, well-tested and well-defined models.”   Model insurers should work with models – neat.

Crafting the Perfect Insurer

Beans Count

You'll have heard the saying, “If it doesn't get measured, it doesn't get managed”. But you may not have heard it recently, and if you have, it might have been delivered in an ironic tone. Metrics-obsessed management is associated with an uptight, wood-for-the-trees mentality. Measurement calls to mind “scientific management”, time-and-motion studies, behemoth organizations operating in long-gone environment where little changed year after year.

It's true that business saw an injection of creativity in management practices once the baby boomers took over the big desks. And people who stick to a measurement-driven approach get labeled as bean counters. However, my thesis is that we need bean counters because beans count. There's more to management than measurement – but measurement runs through management like connective tissue.

The things we care about in business are often abstract qualities: benefit, quality, risk. Yet unless we turn these abstract notions into concrete measurables, we can't tell whether or not we're achieving them, or how much they're costing us. The insurance industry is built on the reduction of risk to credible variables. For countries with socialised healthcare, measures of quality-of-life must be used to decide on treatment priorities. While it can be misleading and offensive to seek dollar values for abstract qualities, we do need to apply some kind of measurement system.

Business measures don't have to be designed with absolute scales. You can apply measurement – and thereby management rigor – to any area of activity with a small set of relative indicators. This is why our opinions as consumers are queried by categories such as “strongly agree”. How do we know if our customer service is getting better, for example? A simple start is to ask customers whether they'd rate their just-completed encounter as better than, worse than or the same as their last encounter with our organization.

If we're not measuring, we're not managing. I'll come back to the dangers of measuring the wrong things in another post.

CSIO Appoints CEO

Catherine Smola was appointed CEO of the Centre for Study of Insurance Operations in Canada this month.  She visited us at ACORD to discuss the partrnership we have had for many years. Catherine is pictured next to me with my senior team. 

Download CSIO Press Release

 

Did you know...

that you can read full details about installation, configuration, business object development, and troubleshooting for the IBM WebSphere Business Integration Adapter for ACORD XML

WebSphere Business Integration Adapters

 

ACORD Standards in South Africa

The recently established South African ACORD standards are set to impact the industry with the launch of Lime Street Xchange, a platform for parties to exchange data in real time or batch. I wish this new venture every success.  SAIT News Link

Download SAIT News