Gregory Maciag

City Data - Open Standards

Several major cities are moving forward with open data. Open data is getting to be a catchphrase in government. It's all about getting information out to citizens, in the interests of transparency and accountability. But opening up data goes hand in hand with choosing data standards. Naturally, these city authorities are also looking to open standards.

Andrea Reimer, a city councillor at Vancouver, which decided for open data in 2009, was reported as saying: “The local online community was all very, very happy, and now we just have to look forward on implementation and figuring sort of the order with which we do that.” Is there a hint here that maybe the way ahead was a little fuzzy? I guess a councillor doesn't need to have a view on the implementation details. The city's staff will be able to figure this out.

Now San Francisco is to hire an open data officer. Every city department will also nominate someone responsible for open data, and common data standards will be established. Perhaps it's just the way this news has been reported, but there's a feeling here that standards are being tacked on as an afterthought. Also, there's an assumption that open standards are available to cover all this data.

I think there may be some more work to do here. I'd love to think existing open standards are going to be up to the job. But I'm struggling to identify those open standards. I hope the leading cities, by working together to share the load, will fill the gaps they are bound to find. It would be a tragedy if we see a proliferation of incompatible standards.

Does it matter? I think so. First, there's the unnecessary cost of developing different standards. Second, there's the matter of comparison. A citizen of one city should be able to compare services, costs, priorities, outcomes and quality with those of another city. In this context, IBM's City Forward initiative looks interesting.

Vancouver

San Francisco

City Forward

Steadfast Drives ACORD Standards in Australia

Robert Kelly, Steadfast Chairman, spoke at ITC 2012 on the benefits of ACORD Standards to the Australia insurance market.  Whether it was data messaging or ACORD Forms (something I remember proposing a few years back), he was ecstatic about the outcome.  Robert founded Steadfast (A network of brokers) and they are doing an IPO in 2013.

People are always looking for the seemingly illusive business case for industry standards. For Robert Kelly, ACORD Standards are just part of the business.  How refreshing!

Steadfast IPO

Steadfast Home Page

ACORD Standards Could Save Billions

Simon  Squires is Chairman of London Market Group’s working party and regional  chief processing officer at XLGroup. Read his interview at
Download 2012-10-12 Simon Squires

His answer to what other company do you most admire?  At the moment I am very impressed by Greg Maciag and his team at ACORD  who are providing a standards toolkit that the global insurance industry can deploy. This has the potential to generate billions of dollars of savings and improve transactional efficiency across the global insurer, co-insurer, reinsurer, and broking communities." 

He was a speaker at the ITC 2012 in London. I  spoke with Simon and he is eager to share the benefits of ACORD Standards. If you plan to be in Fort Lauderdale at the ACORD Implementation Forum (October 22-24) at the Harbor Beach Marriott Hotel, Simon will be here with us. 

2011 ACORD Awards - Fort Lauderdale

Christoper Murulo of Sword holds back his enthusiasm.

 SEE FORT LAUDERDALE PHOTOS HERE

NIPR Recognized at ACORD Awards Dinner

NIPR was established as an affiliate to the NAIC in 1996 to facilitate the electronic exchange of producer information.  It’s a self-supporting not-for-profit organization governed by a Board comprised of state regulators, industry and association members.

Two years ago, NIPR began work with ACORD to create messages for the submission of producer licensing data.  They in turn share this data with state insurance departments through the NAIC’s Regulatory Information Retrieval System. I truly believe that this trailblazing collaboration between state insurance regulatory and industry systems will serve as a gateway to greater cooperation in the future.  It benefits the regulatory community the industry our policyholders and consumers.

The ACORD Rainmaker Award is a fitting tribute to all the people at NIPR for their contribution to and support of ACORD industry standards. Accepting the Award on behalf of NIPR was Executive Director Mary Ellen Waggoner.  Download NIPR News Release

Implementation Forum in Fort Lauderdale

Rick Heil was the master of ceremonies at the ACORD Annual Awards Dinner held at the Implementaion Forum this week. Rick heads our standards activities for the ACORD Standards Committee. He upstaged the boss by sporting a tuxedo.

ACORD coaches were on hand to assist participants.

Plus agent scholarship participants.

Plus our recognized volunteers.

Finally our new ACORD Certified Experts with Beth Grossman (ACORD Chief Learning Officer)

Maximize your ROI with ACORD Standards

When you think about industry events and the value proposition of participation, remember that ACORD is owned by you (the industry) and we are keen to see you succeed.   We have the experts, the resources and (now) the tools to assist you and your team.

I will never tell you that implementing standards is easy, but the return on your investment is stunning and perpetual. Industry standards benefit by the network effect. Every time an implementation goes live, the value of your investment increases. 

I look forward to seeing you at the ACORD Implementation Forum in Fort Lauderdale.

The New Player

The new players are by nature iconoclastic. They arrive with the intention of shaking things up. They've spotted an entrenched inefficiency in the market, developed a new process, tool or theory, or been able to seize some scarce resource to bypass slower incumbents.

Curiously, given the creativity and the clarity of vision that marks most new entrants, they can also be extremely conservative in areas outside the niche in which they seek to make their mark. It's almost as if the effort required to detect and exploit their unique opportunity shuts down their sensitivity to contingent issues.

When the rubber meets the road, even some of the youngest and brashest new entrants may see industry standards as an unnecessary “big business” affectation with an unacceptable cost. For these organizations, standards may represent another “old style” variable invalidated by their breakthrough strategies.

However, savvy new entrants see their youth as an opportunity to judge dispassionately every factor affecting their chosen industry, and to score these factors for their relevance to the mission rather than their association with the old guard.  In particular, new lean operators entering the insurance market can grasp industry standards as a key ally in their goal of beating incumbents on costs, agility or openness. The smart ones see the industry's investment in ACORD Standards not as an obstacle, but as an entry prize.

The ACORD Certified Experts Are Coming

This is a real big deal!  One of our major challenges today is to support all the organizations participating and implementing ACORD Standards across the globe.  A good problem to have, by the way.  And there are limits to how many people I can hire.  So taking an idea from the association playbook, we are going to work with member volunteers to create a cadre of subject matter experts (SMEs).  In fact, there are many consultants that teach ACORD classes today.  And if you search the job site monster.com, it's amazing how many people say they have ACORD experience.

ACORD members know what they don't know.  They do not really know who has the knowledge, as a London cabbie might say.  So we are launching ACE (ACORD Certified Expert) to transfer knowledge, test and provide continuing education. There will be a Life, Non-Life and Reinsurance designation, each composed of three parts: Basic Insurance, Basic ACORD and ACORD Standards. We will also offer an ACE Developer track in the future intended for developers and architects.

There will be an annual ACE membership fee to offset the cost of supporting the experts, providing continuing education and organizing a Society to provide feedback and sheperd continuous improvement.  The bottom line is that we will have more experts and that will both increase and improve implementations of ACORD Standards.  Beth Grossman is the head of Training & Education if you want more details.  ACE Press Release  

Low Pressure... High Payback

Organizations can also get on the standards track by the low-pressure, high-payback practice of integrating standards as a decision checkpoint in their development processes. This means that organizations who understand the long-term value of standards but who understandably don't want to make widespread radical changes to their systems put a policy in place that allows standards to be introduced gradually and painlessly alongside planned changes.

An organization can decide that over some timeline – and it may be three years, five years or even ten years – it will decree that every time it revises its software, every time it looks at a vendor, and every time it issues an RFP, it will require standards to be used. Organizations don't need to retro-fit standards if they can't make the value sums work for their environment. They don't need to build change programs around standards: they can embed standards in their change programs.

Industry Standards Decision Not Difficult

Business information standards are the single most important issue in contemporary management. Without standards, there’s no genuine connectivity, there’s just spaghetti. Without standards, there’s no transparency to your business processes, just shadows where error and fraud can breed.

For doubters who are basically demanding proof for the efficacy of standards in their own organizations, ACORD can offer tools and examples, but we can't provide quantified answers. We don't know everybody's business. Attempting to persuade people of their own best interests is a losing game. The best we can do is to offer examples of the alternatives.

Just because another person's point of view seems crazy to us, it doesn't mean that they see it as crazy. If we can suspend the passion, and get to the evidence, then we'll all make progress.  One productive way of offering evidence is to encourage organizations to view standards adoption as a gradual and reversible process, rather than a cataclysmic big-bang change.

ACORD Tools

ACORD continues to develop publishing and educational tools to ease the uptake of our standards. A number of companies in the vendor community also provide excellent tools to help with ACORD standards adoption.

The extent and richness of ACORD's standards dictate that some kind of support beyond sequential documentation will become desirable in any truly standards-based organization. With standards usage the norm rather than the exception on every systems development project – and indeed every business initiative – the ability to navigate the ACORD standards family and drill down to needed detail and sample implementations becomes essential to productivity.

The growing value of allied business standards in related domains makes the development of tools for browsing and querying standards an important task for the community.