Gregory Maciag

IT Heart of Business

Commenting on a recent Ovum report, Joe McKendrick at Insurance Networking News says IT can come to the rescue of businesses experiencing tough times. This is true, but it's not earth-shattering news.

Technology has always been an enabler – in good times as well as bad. Humankind's most important technologies have included rocks and paper. Today, our major technology involves the capture, sharing and processing of electronic data. It's not a question of organizations carrying on without technology, and then suddenly getting teched up when the going gets tough. IT is right at the heart of business, now and for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps, then, the angle here is that tough times work to the advantage of people seeking larger budgets for IT teams, or more prestige for IT disciplines. Maybe. But I think IT has arrived. It doesn't need special pleading any more. And this is also the case for industry standards.  IT is all about standards and IT is the business. Everyone should know this.    IT To The Rescue

Old Formats

The FDA still uses a format for exchanging data about drug studies which was introduced in 1999. The format doesn't include metadata so implementers use a separate XML file that describes the relationships buried in the data. Interestingly, the date stamp on the formatted file isn't Y2K compliant (although the data within the file is).

Does this matter? Some would say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But it seems to me that with the pace of change in our world, this is too complacent an attitude. More and more, you don't know something is broken until it meets a situation it can't handle – by which time it's too late.

I'd say that even the requirement to align a data format with a descriptive XML file is asking for trouble. Self-describing data has a whole, lengthy list of benefits for developers, integrators and users. A twin-file, “other-describing data” approach isn't the same thing at all.

Data Exchange Standards

On Twitter

I find that adults (i.e. business people) on Twitter often use it as an extension to a blast email on something.  Whether it's a special product price or a recent announcement and sometimes it gets whimsical.  It's very much unlike the "What are you doing now" crowd. Oh yes... I am working in Fort Lauderdale... the beach is outside my window... and I am drinking a bottle of water.  Do you really care?  Some people look to get as many Followers as possible. It could be an ego thing but it comes with some responsibility, especially if you Tweet professionally.  Yes, Twitter can be useful and we hear lots of stories about crowd sourcing and disaster support for sure. While my daughter and her friends use Instant Messaging all the time, I seldom see them use Twitter. So I was glad to hear our panel at ITC 2012 reflect on it among other things.

Mark Chapman of Global Aerospace, commenting at ITC 2012: “Twitter is great – you can connect with your customers... until you realize you've got nothing to say.”

It's like those We've-got-a-website pages you used to see in, oh, 1998. Joining Twitter is a real commitment. You don't just need a steady stream of (interesting) things to say. You also need a voice: this is going to be a corporate mouthpiece, and a mouthpiece that might get slapped.

I meet people who've “come out the other side” of Twitter – been there, done that. Many corporates are going to reach the same conclusion. Just as you find default corporate websites that are little more than brochures, so we're finding default corporate Twitter streams that just rebroadcast press release headlines. And that's okay.

Philip Proost of Caitlin, on the same panel, mentioned they are encouraging people on to specialised apps and away from general social media platforms. Elsewhere, contributors mentioned the problem of emailed attachments. The goal for business must be to provide the usability associated with commercial, all-purpose apps, grafted on to specialised applications serving business processes.

Value and Volume

Which homeowner problem leads to the most insurance claims?

If you said “fire”, you'd be wrong. True, fire is responsible for the largest payouts. But not for the largest number of claims. This honor goes to wind and hail damage. Fire isn't even third in line in the numerical claims stakes – that place goes to water damage and freezing.

 Findings like this remind us that good data give us a better handle on our business than gut reaction. The story also reinforces the point that information systems have to serve business processes rather than headline dollar amounts. It might feel wrong, but perhaps your organization is better off investing in systems, processes and people that support the high volume business rather than the rarer, big ticket events. You don't know until you measure.  Claims

Proprietary Process is Passe

A panellist from a big broker summarised how thinking about data and processes has changed in the industry. Speaking at ITC 2012, he said everybody is realizing what they thought were proprietary processes probably aren't – and if they are, they shouldn't be.

He went on to say his firm no longer writes software, and that everything they do with a counter-party is by necessity non-proprietary. The reality, he said, is that these processes don't bring competitive advantage. It's how well you perform them and how well you integrate them that count.

I applaud the idea that proprietary processes should be regarded with suspicion rather than pride. This is an important evolutionary stage in the industry's development. As outlined elsewhere at the Congress, people in the insurance industry need to know the difference between inventing and innovating, and when each is appropriate. We don't want to be inventing pieces of technology that already exist. We do want to innovate by exploiting what's already out there.

Standards are a Right...

When you get involved in developing and promoting data standards, you have many conversations around implementation. How can you help people use the standards? How can you ensure they start getting the business benefits of standards as quickly and thoroughly as possible? How can you spread the news?

Unless they have a short-term proprietary advantage in mind, most people accept the value of standards – intellectually. Embracing standards emotionally is a little tougher. What is there to love about a set of templates? Few of us love order for its own sake: and those who do may not have the best business instincts.

We need emotional engagement with standards if we're to achieve wide and rigorous implementation. Intellectual agreement and goodwill on their own don't make things happen. The key to emotional engagement with standards is not to focus on the inherent qualities of a standard, but on the better world that standards help to bring about.

It's my belief that no one should begin a career, or start a project, or take responsibility for a business area, that isn't founded on solid in-place standards. Foundation standards should be present and obvious in every field of endeavor. Absence of such standards must be seen as anomalous, wayward and unsupportable.

So, my approach to promoting full implementation of standards is to focus on the value of the goal, not the pleasures and hardships of the journey. Creating a standards-founded world – a world where everyone expects to work on a solid base of standards – isn't easy. Like most things that represent real progress, it's going to take time and effort.

It's not unlike having a clean water supply, or a trustworthy currency. If your people can rely on water and money that aren't going to poison or bankrupt them, they can do so much more with their lives. Similarly, if the people in your organization don't have to spend hours every day fetching dirty data from a distant well, they can get on with building the business. If they can trade data among themselves, with partners and with customers, knowing the data will always retain its value, then they can build greater knowledge, have better conversations, and develop more profitable relationships.  Let's declare standards to be a right, not a privilege. Can you imagine a world without them? Impossible.

Business Process Patents

Web company Go Daddy has registered a patent for “announcing a domain name registration on a social website”. The nub of the patented method seems to be the ability to create a time-triggered announcement.  Business process patents are always controversial. Do they have much value? Would Go Daddy actually be able to defend its rights to this process?

We have a mismatch between actionable intellectual property and registerable intellectual property. In other words, there's stuff that's of real, innovative value – and then there's stuff you can get a patent on.  Domain Name Wire

ACORD Standards Save BILLIONS

PEARL RIVER, NY October 25, 2012 – During the 2012 ACORD Implementation Forum in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, Douglas Hubbard, President of Hubbard Decision Research and author of the business best-seller "How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business", announced that implementing ACORD Standards can save the insurance industry at least one billion dollars

Hubbard researched ACORD member companies who actively implement Standards, and revealed his findings as part of the Value to Members Project, an initiative designed to help businesses understand the value of working with ACORD Standards. "Small efficient improvements can add up to a lot. I think this research is an example of that. ACORD simplifies processes for the entire industry. There's value in that and we can prove that," said Hubbard.

Doug Hubbard's research proves one of the founding principles of ACORD; that working with us is worth the investment because it saves money and increases efficiency, not only for individual companies but for the entire industry," said Gregory A. Maciag, ACORD President and CEO. "Our members have known this for a long time and it's great to have their belief in our standards validated."

Hubbard and his team will continue to measure the value of ACORD implementation and will make his research available to all ACORD members. "This just makes sense. Projects that have Standards at their core are more efficient, and we've only just begun to calculate their true value. I think the value of ACORD Standards will continue to grow," Hubbard concluded. For more information about ACORD Standards and the Value to Members research, visit the ACORD website at www.acord.org.

Healthcare Standards

Ross Koppel, professor of sociology and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, is concerned that the transition to digitized healthcare records is neither efficient nor cost-effective. He says: “The problem is that a lot of the software out there is really clunky, is not user friendly … and the structure of the market is such that the vendors of these programs are not as responsive to the needs of clinicians as they should be.”

According to Adam Ludwig at Technonomy, Koppel goes on to say “the high cost and protracted implementation time of digital record-keeping programs leave hospitals little flexibility to make improvements based on feedback... One solution, he suggests, is for the government to push harder to enact data standards and oversight.”

Koppel's analysis highlights a couple of important aspects of data standards. First, industry standards are always faster to apply when compared with creating specific workarounds between incompatible systems. Second, the time lags involved in refining or evolving proprietary standards to meet changing business needs are unacceptable. And third, well managed industry standards integrate responses to the changing business environment through their maintenance and improvement processes.

The key to the solution is indeed standards. But the sector needs to look to itself for leadership. Healthcare providers must agitate for standards implementation. They don't need government to tell them what they know they ought to do.

By the way, in case you're in doubt as to whether there are really lots of data flows in healthcare, take a quick look at slide #8 in Kathleen Connor's presentation at  X12 & HL7.  Here is the Koppel mention in Techonomy

Regulation: A Measured Pace is Best

A loose quote from James Wrynn, former New York State Superintendent of Insurance, speaking at out ITC 2012 event in London: Crises happen at high speed, but regulation is evolutionary and must proceed steadily.

There's a saying that fast laws tend to be bad ones. (Tell me about it.) The same goes for regulations. You have to be sure a crisis is really resolved before you try to overhaul the system. As the shock waves from a crisis lessen, you can start to make small changes. (Amen.)

Serving Specialists

John Hennessey, CEO Europe, CNA Insurance, in his keynote address to ITC 2012, quoted Bill Gates to the effect that applying technology magnifies efficient and inefficient processes alike. It's true: technology works like an amplifier or an accelerator. You have to be careful how you hook it up, or the results can be devastating.

He also said our industry is increasingly a world of specialists. The days of the generalist have gone and letting people “play with the sharp knives” can be dangerous. We need to support people at the front line so they can do their jobs well, and not expect them to perform every function required by the surrounding business process.

Hennessey also said that with continuing industry consolidation, the need for common business platforms will become more obvious to all. Common platforms will enable and liberate competition, not stifle it. (As Ian Summers said elsewhere, we must “collaborate to compete”.)

Pulling these thoughts together suggests we need to restrict the use of power tools and pay more attention to services. The aim of IT should be to get information to those who need it, as they need it. The all-singing, all-dancing applications suites we're used to on the desktop must yield to more streamlined services that match specific business processes. If this is the direction we're going in, then we'll need to pay closer attention to process analysis, and the ways in which people really work.

Facebook Tips

Here is an article courtesy of ACT about using Facebook.

Download Facebook Engagement Oct2012

At Facebook’s first-ever Marketing Conference in February 2012, the company released a startling number that quickly found its way into social media consultants’ Twitter streams and new business pitch decks: 84 percent of business page fans do not see the page’s posts in their Facebook news feeds.

For agencies that are exploring social media’s potential (and asking tough questions about ROI), this number is alarming. Why should resource-strapped agents put energy into creating Facebook content when so few of their hard-earned fans are seeing the final product?

It’s a fair question, but before you shutter your Facebook page, you should understand what’s behind this number, and what you can do about it. With a few simple changes to your posts, you’ll be reaching more fans and building more engagement with minimal effort. Read more....

Insurance Apps

I found a good, short (2:26) video demonstrating a mobile insurance app on an iPad, using IBM's Worklight technology. The key technical point in the demo is that policy information isn't kept on the device but loaded rapidly from secure servers. And the key business point? It's not made explicitly in the video, but when you view demos like this, it's hard not to believe that tablet+cloud is the only way ahead for every agent. IBM Developer Works