Gregory Maciag

The Future of eSignatures

ACORD (www.acord.org) released a new Strategic Analysis on eSignatures and e-Delivery in the insurance industry. Developed by international law firm Locke Lord LLP (www.lockelord.com) at the request of ACORD, the document provides an overview of the legal requirements, and best practices for implementation.

"We worked with Locke Lord to create this document at the request of a number of AUGIE participants and others to serve as a guide for agents, distributors and carriers who want to use or enable electronic signatures but are not sure how to get started. The biggest issue is the lack of comfort with the legal requirements and the inability to establish a process or choose a technology. While ACORD is not providing legal advice in any way, by commissioning Locke Lord, a firm which has much experience in this space, we feel we can help support the industry and our membership" says Marcia Berner, Director, Implementation Services, ACORD.

The Strategic Analysis suggests that implementers start with one process and product. To further support such efforts, it lists a number of general best practices, as well as specific ones for insurers and producers.

For example, at a higher level, it recommends that "emails should be sent with links to a secure site" and that it's essential to determine a bounce-back policy. More specifically, it tells insurers to "develop an efficient method to review and verify Producers' requests for approval of their Electronic Signature or electronic delivery processes.

By fostering a greater understanding of the legal requirements for both Electronic Signatures and electronic delivery of documents, the Strategic Analysis serves as a foundational document for insurers and producers. It also provides definitions of commonly used terms and includes overviews of both ESIGN and UETA, special considerations for using voice signatures, and subjects such as record retention and admissibility of evidence in court. It builds upon and broadens previous works by the Insured Retirement Institute (IRI) and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) that focused more specifically on the annuities sector.

"Over the past few years, interest and work around eSignatures and eDelivery increased dramatically. Agents and carriers came to us with a strong desire to implement them, but with major concerns about the right way to do both and to work with each other in the process. By talking with both groups, it became clear that both have common questions and concerns mostly based in making sure they are clear on the legal requirements and how to make sure they are met. With ACORD's unique role in the industry, we felt that this was an area in which we could help bring parties together, and it fits nicely into our 2020 initiative, an initiative that is looking towards increased implementation and the future of the industry," concluded Berner.

The Strategic Analysis can be found on the ACORD Knowledge Center at www.acord.org/knowledge and is available to both members and non-members.

In addition, ACORD will be hosting a series of related webinars over the coming months. For a schedule and to register, please visit www.acord.org/knowledge.

Here is the document: Download ESignatures

Intelligence Everywhere

The environment is becoming a multi-headed informer. It used to be that people accessed machines, but increasingly machines are monitoring us. That might sound Orwellian, but it's mostly benign. The more intelligent our environment becomes, the more power we have as individuals – and the better able we are to collaborate.

Take, for example, all the current research into e-textiles. This is an area of research and production focused on materials that can transmit information. The most obvious first application is in military clothing, because a uniform made of e-textiles is like a flexible, person-sized, plug-and-play network. It's not hard to imagine all our personal connectivity needs melting into invisibility through this kind of technology. Today you might think your phone has become part of you – but tomorrow you might find that you've become part of your phone.

The conjunction of information technology and new physical materials is also changing the way our buildings work. For instance, hospitals are installing “intelligent glass” instead of curtained screens. This means that the space around a bed can be made private at the press of a button (or, more likely, the wave of a hand). The glass can switch from transparent to opaque instantly. This means better hygiene, better sound containment, more localized heating and ventilation – and reduced effort for nurses.

The intelligent environment is perhaps most obvious in our transportation systems, when we can expect the growing uptake of telematics to be matched by smart traffic management systems that make better use of scarce blacktop resources. From the clothes you wear to the rooms you relax in and the roads you travel, computing and communications are enriching the potential of our world.

Technology and the Healthcare Value Gap in the USA

The piece was prompted by a conversation between a health services researcher and the head of health information technology of Taiwan’s Bureau of National Health Insurance, which administers Taiwan’s single-payer national health insurance system. By that time, virtually all of Taiwan’s claims were billed electronically. Economix

Data Scientists

Covering a Symantec survey of information management costs and practices, Joe McKendrick includes one very important conclusion that needs highlighting. This is the fact that not all information is equal: “Business must be able to separate useless data from valuable business information and protect it accordingly.”

Before the days when technology was everywhere, there wasn't such an issue with separating real information from noise. Anything recorded in a system went through a slow and expensive input process, so no one was likely to make a permanent, organized record of something ephemeral or irrelevant. Today we have the opposite problem. Everything arrives electronically, so it's easier to keep everything than separate the wheat from the chaff.

The problem is that enterprises wind up spending millions of dollars storing and churning through vast amounts of trash. It's as if they're trying to run the business in a factory where the floor is never swept and the garbage truck never comes. Talk about friction.

The answer may lie in one of McKendrick's other recent posts, where he looks at the growing need for “data scientists” in enterprises – people who can do this important separation activity in a complex, multi-dimensional data environment.  But perhaps we need to go beyond that. We should be pressing to give everyone in an organization a basic understanding of data principles and values. They don't have to be statisticians or programmers – not full fledged data scientists, but data-aware individuals.

Enterprises hire financial specialists but that doesn't mean everyone else is excused knowing the difference between profit and loss. Similarly, we should require our people to make relevant judgements about information assets (and liabilities).

This wouldn't only make for a more efficient organization and lower operational costs, though these are valuable benefits. It would also give people an extra set of skills for understanding the business. By better understanding the role of the information in their domain, they gain a greater appreciation of the domain – and more power to perform well.

Scientists
Sloppy Data

Financial Standards

For solid commentary on the progress of data standards in the finance industry, keep tabs on Virginie O'Shea's blog. Based at Aite Group, O'Shea is great on the business context and the challenges of introducing standards.   http://virginieoshea.wordpress.com/

Is "Dead" really Dead?

One of the tried and trusted ways of getting your industry report noticed is to give it a title based on the “Is x dead?” formula. I recently noticed “Is data modeling dead?” and “Is business intelligence dead?” and you can probably think of many more.

Usually the answer to the “Is x dead?” question is: No, but it's changing.

This reflects an eternal pattern in technology development. New technologies displace some aspects of existing technologies, but overall they tend to grow the field rather than diminish it. TV never killed radio, but it sure changed it. Online hasn't killed TV, but it sure changed it. And so on.

We ought to read the “Is x dead?” formula as “It's time to think differently about x”. To take a core ACORD example, the question is not, and has never been, “Are forms dead?” Instead, the emergence of new ways of operating prompts the community to think, “It's time to think differently about forms”. Forms continue to be useful, but aspects of what they used to do are now done by other means. And ACORD Forms are now digital (i.e. smart) and can bridge to sophisticated systems via Standards.

Beyond Standards Publication - We Need Tools

“Despite increasing public support (as well as a number of executive mandates) publishing public data in a machine-readable format is not as simple as pressing the 'publish' button. Why? Equally important as exposing the information itself is fostering a vibrant developer ecosystem around it. By making the publishing agency, not the public, responsible for making information immediately useful, government can lower the barriers associated with consuming its data and introduce additional citizen services at little to no cost to the agency.”

Thus Benjamin J. Balter of the SoftWare Automation and Technology (SWAT) Team in the Executive Office of the President.  Balter hits the nail squarely on the head. To publish is never enough. This is also a core truth of data standards. Standards are for implementing, not reading. It's increasingly clear that the bodies charged with developing and promoting standards on behalf of their host communities are also obligated to bring those standards to life. In the past, this has meant advocacy, education and training. Those activities will continue, but they must be joined by tools and services that give direct access to standardized data and processes.

Also, note that Balter says that a more active publishing organization actually saves the wider community money. His argument translates easily into a more diverse business domain. In the case of the insurance industry, the equivalents of the agency and the public are one and the same group: the business community, served by its neutral standards organization.  Government CIO

Protective Standards

I just viewed a very small slide set about pathways to data standards. It comes from the health domain, but it applies universally. It's short, but it contains pithy observations on how standards develop, and it's particularly sharp on proprietary versus non-proprietary standards.

I want to highlight the final bullet point: “Standards can be as much about protection of an industry or the companies in that industry, as it can be about progress or innovation.”

I guess that the authors' angle is that (proprietary) standards can be attempts to erect barriers to market entry or customer defection. They're maybe warning us that some standards can inhibit their users.

But I'd like to take the comment another way. Progress and innovation are absolutely at the core of protection. So these two characteristics of standards are actually complementary. Standards that enable companies and industries to survive and grow are certainly “protective”. But not in a bad way.

Data Standards Paths

Unstructured Data

AIIM released the results of their recent survey into big data. The title of the report is striking: Big Data – Extracting Value from Digital Landfills.

“Landfill” is a provocative word. The hope that animates analytics is that by-product data can be mined for nuggets of information value, or used to fuel new insights. Contents sent to landfill are waste products that can't be reused or recycled. The implication of the report's title is that advocates of big data are trying to perform alchemy by turning dross into gold.

Digging deeper (if you will) the challenge for organizations seems to be in managing and exploiting unstructured data. Tools are emerging to conjure meaning from unstructured data but these are by no means mainstream at this time. My impression is that organizations are hoarding unstructured data – pictures, charts, audio, video – in hopes that one day they'll get around to turning it into valuable information assets.

However, they might be better advised to catalog their unstructured data at an explicit archiving point, rather than storing up the comprehension and indexing task for some future technology to accomplish.

One reason for cataloging now rather than reverse engineering later is that business information has a lifetime. Much of your unstructured data will be valueless by the time you make it usable. Another reason is that the earlier you use business intelligence, the faster you accrue benefits.

Have you ever seen a pile of old photos or photo albums at a junk sale? Who are all these people, frozen forever in black and white? Perhaps there's a book like this in your family. The people who took the pictures saw no need to provide the captions, because it didn't occur to them that the next generation wouldn't recognize all the uncles and aunts and cousins. A few minutes labeling would have preserved the meaning of the people in the pictures, but they've come down to us as anonymous folks.

So it is with an organization's unstructured data. Who is speaking in this video? What event are they speaking at? Where is the transcript of what they're saying – because, believe it or not, a delay of a couple of years in transcribing speech can be enough to make topical references or even industry jargon incomprehensible. The speed of change we all talk about is, among other things, a force for semantic decay.

Tools for analyzing unstructured data will undoubtedly be useful. But don't ignore the power your people have right now to turn unstructured data into usable business intelligence. It's cheap and fast to use their knowledge in live mode. And that way you're building an organized store of unstructured information. 

 http://Insurance Networking News

Solvency II Standards

So, look: “A standard framework for delivering Solvency II asset data from investment firms to insurers is at least a year away, asset managers predict. The lack of a central body to develop the standards and potential commercial conflicts of interest mean a market-wide standard will be challenging to develop.”

But standards, together with a central body, surely do exist. ACORD's standards for the insurance industry are stable and proven. They provide the obvious target for building consensus in the asset management industry.

According to Dirk Popielas at JP Morgan Asset Management in Frankfurt, “Over time we will see standardisation starting to emerge. Inevitably, when people are going through the requirements for the first time, they need to go through it themselves and act on what is in front of them. If there are more efficient ways of addressing the requirements it is likely that markets will find their way to those solutions”.

I am always amazed how much everyone talks about standards and so few really know what existing standards are available. Communications is a constant battle.  ACORD and XBRL are working closely and I'll keep you posted on our progress.

Let me accelerate this process. Go to acord.org. You'll find everything you need.  Risk Net

Goals & Tools

Good quote on health IT from Kaiser Permanente president and CEO George Halvorson: “The goal is the care [...] The technology is a tool. [...] A lot of people put medical records in place but don't have a goal, don't have a particular strategy to use them, and if you just put the medical record in place and don't use it for anything, care doesn't get better.”

Halvorson also refers to process improvement guru Edward Deming, saying that savings follow from improvement activity, while targeting savings instead of improvement usually leads to reduced quality. So, it's better to focus on reducing the incidence of broken bones among seniors than on reducing the cost of broken bones. This way, care will be improved and savings made.

I'd develop the argument somewhat. The healthcare sector is becoming increasingly complex and collaborative. This means that medical records have to serve many goals throughout the collaborating community. A good standards process can ensure that record structures are designed to serve all the goals of the sponsoring community. In fact, good standards can even help to enable new goals by providing enhanced clarity over the nature and structure of the information at play in the domain. Standards are a powerful way of promoting business strategy over short-term, silo thinking.

 Information Week

 

IT is Healthcare's Biggest Challenge

If state healthcare exchanges survive the Supreme Court challenge to health care reform, the election and state tea party activists, health policy experts are worried they could still be brought down by a much more mundane problem: information technology

Politico

IT Strategy

“The role of technology strategy is to examine the core business function that a company wants to pursue, and to determine how the path of the business will align with technology developments going forward and the business opportunities the company may take. The strategist must also consider which opportunities will fail, are uncertain, or as yet unknown - in addition to considering the aspects of the business that work well with technology today, but may or may not thrive into the future.” - Stefan Dietrich, CITOResearch.com

We oftentimes take “strategy” just to mean a choice from a selection of options. Dietrich reminds us that strategy is actually about dealing with what the future may throw at us. As decision makers, our job is to make the best decisions we can today for the brightest future we can construct. With the uncertainties inherent in this responsibility, we do well to maximize flexibility, use common goods and evolve incrementally. Data standards demonstrate these three virtues, giving organizations adaptable assets that are shared by the community and designed for controlled, continuous improvement. Standards form the natural heart of strategy.  thestreet.com

Multiple View of Truth

I recommend Jeff Jonas's blog for his acute insights into data management and analytics. Jonas would have a fair claim to have invented a lot of this stuff, and he's always worth listening to – especially when he challenges the easy cliches that we take for granted every day.

Back in 2006 he made the important point that “there is no such thing as a single version of the truth”, arguing that enterprises need to keep pluralism in their data holdings. One example he uses is that it's better to send a hotel guest's statement to the address she gives when checking out than to pick a “better” address based on some other source and the currency she paid in.

Jonas continued this theme when discussing the value of keeping plural data views when combining data from different sources. He set out a cogent argument for why “merge and purge” approaches destroy value. There is still a need to associate different data sets that represent facts about the same real world entities, but we don't need to suppress the variant attributes and relationships that connect with these identities.

As business becomes more analytics-driven, decision makers are recognizing that all data is potentially valuable. But the key word is potentially. Unless you can tie your data together meaningfully, all you have is a big mess. For technologists – who know this well – the added message is that data can be made meaningful without being whittled down to the bare bones.  Jeff Jonas

Crowd Sourced Data Standards?

Can data standards be crowd sourced? New York City has created a wiki that allows anyone to pitch in to the definition of its standards for open data.

Most of us know the wiki approach best through Wikipedia. The Wikipedia format successfully distinguishes between the current state of an article and its history – and any controversy surrounding the contents. People who want an answer refer to the main article, while people who have something to add or change are given the tools to do just that.

Wikipedia works (to the extent that it does) because the people who get involved are knowledgeable and generous. They want to share what they have learned. Sometimes they want to assert a particular interpretation, but most of the time a balanced view wins out. Can we expect the same kind of consensus and quality to emerge from a data standards wiki?

I would like to hope so, because nobody wants to deny the wisdom of the crowd. It's just that I'm not sure what a data standards crowd looks like. Will people with the right kind of knowledge and motivations find the NYC wiki and participate? What kind of reward will they get for improving a definition, or for fighting for or against a specific proposal?

In the realm of Wikipedia, participation is its own reward. I fear that this won't be true in the case of crowdsourced data standards. I'd like to be wrong.

Meanwhile, I notice that the first definition in the reference glossary for the project is for “Agency”. Except it's also a definition for “agency”... The capitalized word has a different meaning from the uncapitalized one. This isn't a very reassuring start.

Black Boxes

Personal Data Security

Download Securing Personal Data in Transit 0712

London Market Group News

The Market delivers with ACORD Standards.  All these strands come together to form the foundation that is delivering the central LMG vision – a market where the end to end insurance transaction is supported by the exchange of structured, ACORD standard data. Claims; accounting and settlement; and now, increasingly, the placing process are underpinned by electronic information. In the main those new processes are now already capable of supporting every nuance of London market business.  Download LMG News Jul12PUB

Big Data Standards and Provenance

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a fresh and important perspective on standards for big data that business technologists should consider seriously. The key quote from a recent NIST workshop is from Howard Wactlar of the National Science Foundation: “[T]he real breakthroughs will come when we are able to use someone else’s data.”

How many businesses are investing in their own proprietary data models intended to facilitate data integration across their own sources... without considering the need to integrate other sources? It's a natural viewpoint to take – but a limiting one. It ignores the fact that the development of technical standards for big data and cloud services are driving the wider shareability of data.

 The scientists at the workshop recognized three challenges to standards for big data in their area of interest. These are provenance, cross-domain standards, and security. I guess cross-domain standards naturally come top of my own list, because creating definitions that enable people to share data across boundaries is what industry standards are all about – from the department level right up to international trading. But the scientists put “provenance” first: for them, knowing where a piece of data came from is on a par with knowing what it represents.

As business organizations come to share, trade and aggregate data on a wider scale, the question of provenance will assume a greater priority for us too. Would you buy a ten-year price data series without some assurance that it comes from a reputable source?

Now, scientists guard reputation through institutions – principally universities, research institutions and learned journals. These bodies act as the guarantors of data quality. Business does not have the same reputation infrastructure. Data providers with trusted brands may well act as sourcers and packagers of raw big data, underwriting its quality before selling it on to users. If so, they too will need their quality standards – ideally, open, transparent ones. Arguably, within specific industries, trade associations might be better placed to fulfil this function on behalf of the communities they serve.

Standards for Big Data

Wine & Data Standards? You Bet!

On a lighter note, kudos to the people at the Open Wine Consortium, who want to create data standards for wine. Ideally, they'd like an international identifier for wines like the ISBN is for books – the AVIN.

 Seriously, this wouldn't just be helpful for those of us who'd like to be able to take a quick, preferably automated note of a good wine without writing out a screed of details. Data standards would also help to improve efficiency and productivity in what is a complex, global and fast-moving business.  Open Wine Consortium

BYOD

Here is another piece on Bring Your Own Device from the Agents Council on Technology.

Download ACT Article BYOD June2012

 

BYOD

Bring Your Own Device...  The genie is, once again, out of the bottle. With so many of us using and relying on smartphones and other connected devices, the line between personal and business equipment is blurring. CIOs and CTOs are struggling with the implications of BYOD – Bring Your Own Device. On the one hand, if staff pay for and maintain their own devices to do work, then that's a cool saving. On the other hand, such practices blow a hole in your security and support strategies.

I think decision makers have to attack this situation on two levels. There's a coverage level, whereby you need to make sure that BYOD habits don't break the terms of your cyber risk insurance. You might be able to achieve this with suitably worded BYOD contracts signed by employees. However, you also need to attend to the practical level of the situation. What can you do to strengthen security, ensure applications capability and block the creation of rogue applications?

There's no one-size answer, but the solutions lie on a familiar centralized/devolved spectrum. Ideally, you want all business-critical systems to be accessible only through thin client interfaces. You want to restrict data duplication on mobile devices to temporary, non-user accessible caches. And you want to block any data request that is not suitably authenticated.

It's not hard to imagine workable policies based on these principles. However I fear that unresolved poor practices hanging over from the dawn of the PC era and then the beginnings of the email era will be amplified by BYOD. We continue to let people copy and pass data sets in the form of spreadsheets, which is bad for the health and integrity of the organization's information resources. We also let people paste data in emails in the form of tables and slides – often thereby duplicating snapshot reports that quickly age.

BYOD policy making is a great opportunity to look afresh at all your data custodianship responsibilities, and to educate your people in safe stats.

Industry Leaders Top Issues

Rio de Janeiro, June 19, 2012 -- Over 400 insurance leaders from all sectors of the global industry representing over 50 countries are meeting at the International Insurance Society (IIS) 48th Annual Seminar in Rio de Janeiro this week. A survey of seminar participants on Monday, June 18th sought current views on key industry issues. The survey included over 150 respondents, 30% from Latin America, 21% from Asia Pacific, 20% from Europe, 13% from North America, 10% from Africa and 5% from the Middle East.   Download IIS 2012 News Release