Resource Articles (Continued)....

Insurance & Technology magazine talks about the opportunity for analytics in the claims function.

“Predictive models are born from data. In 2007, it will be imperative for claims departments and their IT counterparts to establish claims data management initiatives so that they can undertake predictive projects. It is both a curse and a blessing that claims operations have as much data as they have. The curse is that managing this data manually is a seemingly insurmountable task. Fortunately, some excellent technology solutions in the marketplace are available to help. The blessing of the vast amount of claims data is that the models generated from the data are robust. The continual flow of data keeps the models current and allows skilled business analysts to react to changes in the claims environment.”

The Katie School of Insurance at Illinois State University has developed quite a bit of research about insurance claims data. Claims magazine profiled some of the work they’ve done. Here is an excerpt which is right on target.

“Two of the five biggest pain points related to data are lack of data standards and lack of metrics generated by the system that actually improve performance on key issues. The lack of effective metrics can be traced back to a specific root cause: failing to consider at the time of capture and deployment, how data will be used to produce information that can support fact-based operations decision-making. Without that strategic approach from the outset, managers will be flooded with data but lack useful, actionable information that can help them accomplish their goals."

Warren Weiss of Foundation Capital spoke last summer at the Dow Jones Enterprise Ventures conference in San Jose. He was with CSC/Continuum prior to becoming a VC, so he speaks from the business side as well as the investor side. He really likes the benefits of SaaS, as stated in this article from Webwereld.

"Warren Weiss, general partner at Foundation Capital in Menlo Park, Calif., also is skeptical about investing in companies that sell packaged software applications. Weiss prefers investing in SaaS models that cater to customers that don't want to deal with a large systems integration project. "Software as a service is clearly a very interesting area because of the ease of selling into these types of environments where users can use it without a big IT implementation," Weiss says."

An article in Business Week debunks some of the myths around SaaS. The author emphasizes the growth in large companies moving to SaaS delivery model software and points out the hassles and inefficiencies of traditional enterprise software delivery models.

“These companies have recognized the inherent inefficiencies of the traditional software market, including the tremendous time, effort, and cost that organizations -- especially large-scale midsize businesses -- have to expend to install applications and keep them up and running.”

There were many bloggers at Gartner’s Symposium earlier this year. Here’s an example of the buzz around the conference.

“The analysts at Gartner have been playing with their crystal balls again, and they have looked into the future and see lots and lots of companies will be renting their software as a service rather than acquiring license fees. Gartner hosted its Symposium/IT expo event in Orlando, Florida, last week and one of the highlighted prognostications the IT market researcher threw out to the audience is that by 2011, 25 percent of all new licenses to application software for running businesses will be acquired under a Software as a Service, or SaaS, model.”