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IBM FileNet Investments Latest Insurance Research and Insights on the Path Forward

Many of our insurance industry clients invested in their content management and workflow solutions over 10 years ago. These systems were suited for the business requirements at the time and have served their purpose very well. However, due to significant business and technology shifts, these clients are now taking a fresh look at the current state of their technology and reassessing their strategic direction. Major trends such as:

  • the shift to the cloud,
  • new digital business models and fintech and insurtechalternatives,
  • the power of artificial intelligence and automation,
  • and the importance of hybrid work environments,

all demand new innovative approaches and potentially a technology refresh.

For IBM FileNet insurance customers, the foundation is in place for automation with the integration of content and workflow. However, much has changed for these businesses. Perhaps the biggest challenge originally was eliminating paper whereas today information is already fully digitized. Originally, work was segmented between front and back office.Today,insurance customers demand a digital experience that is real time and comprehensive – end-to-end. And back then, very few envisioned permanent hybrid and work-from-home arrangements such as we see post-pandemic.

The good news is that these changes can be addressed by leveraging IBM’s full breadth of capabilities and following their automation roadmap. To do so, we are partnering with our clients to help them think through their strategies, experiment with new concepts and technology, and implement business impactful automation initiatives to last the next ten years and more.

Our approach is simple and straightforward – driven by the goal of creating positive business outcomes. While this sounds obvious, we are often surprised by how many clients consider different paths, often investing in new technology for technology’s sake. Recent purchasing trends of RPA and AI tools are examples of where technology has at times been acquired without determining the full business impact.

Having said that, we believe the following will help you evolve your FileNet environment to meet future challenges:

Understand your overall business and IT automation objectives

We strongly believe in ROI and business case driven projects. Determine the mix of cost optimization/ reduction, revenue enhancement and risk management. This should include both short- and long-term objectives. For example, obtaining meaningful short-term results may be essential for building momentum and funding longer term programs. Further, consider both departmental as well as enterprise needs. Wins at a departmental level for new technology initiatives can lay the foundation to scale up in the future. However, core best practices (for example with Intelligent Document Processing) should be leveraged at scale now.

Assess your current environment and the needs for comprehensive systems integration

This is perhaps the one area that is most overlooked yet, we believe, is the most critical in today’s environment. Data integration is more complex than ever, requiring the combination of both structured and unstructured information from both internal and external sources. Legacy insurance systems for core operations still exist yet automation of end-to-end process are essential to customer journeys.

Regulatory requirements are more complex requiring comprehensive reporting across the entire customer lifecycle including enforcement of security and privacy requirements as well as documented evidence of proper process handling.

Build a comprehensive roadmap

Each insurance  institution is likely to have a unique path forward. Some are looking to just stay current with their platform, performing upgrades in place and minimizing the impact to business operations. Others have a broader cloud strategy and are evolving to Cloud Pak for Business Automation (CP4BA) on IBM Cloud or considering hybrid implementations with AWS. Yet another approach is to leverage new capabilities for Process Mining, RPA, or Operational Intelligence to add significant new value to their current implementation. Some firms are refactoring their applications and using low-code concepts to dramatically shorten delivery time and remain agile to changing business requirements.

While the options are, to some degree, limitless, the roadmap should address the most critical and impactful business objectives. Line of business leaders should articulate how the strategy will help them meet their goals – be it cost reduction, customer acquisition or risk management. Too often the focus is on technical debt which struggles to create a business case. Yes, at some point, that debt must be factored in, but if it can be done while adding business value – all the better.

While the strategy outlined above is the general framework we advise our insurance clients, we have accumulated “lessons learned” and developed best practices that can assist our clients and ensure they are optimizing their investments.

Workflow consolidation

With IBM workflow consolidation of business process management and case management capabilities into a single integrated workflow offering called Business Automation Workflow (BAW), we can help clients optimize their existing workflows and guide where and how to start a new workflow application.

The consolidation has matured over several years such that customers can achieve both a preservation of existing workflows and the ability to take full advantage of newer BAW capabilities. For insurance companies, this becomes valuable as more case-style work is automated. Use cases such as client issue resolution, fraud investigation, complex ,underwriting, complex claims management or audits all benefit from the advanced case management capabilities.

Content

There once was the dream of all content being stored and managed in one repository. That strategy has been abandoned for a long time as insurance companies realizethat requirements for content services varied widely across business units, across geographies, and even within departments. Yet, some of the goals and benefits sought in the original dream persist.

Are documents properly controlled? Can the institution meet all compliance requirements? How are documents secured for those who work from home? Are all insights extracted from content to create competitive advantage? While there never may be one repository, cloud-based content services can begin to deliver answers to these questions. We can help insurance firms build their content strategies and guide them to cloud content services that are secure, robust, accessible, and collaborative.

Conversions

Conversions come in many forms. From migrating content from one repository to another or migrating to the cloud, to more complex reengineering of workflows or converting entire applications. Conversions can be expensive and disruptive to business operations and often lack an adequate business case. Therefore, a clear articulation of the purpose and expected business benefits is essential.

One area we have found helpful is to create different conversion and migration scenarios and analyze the business impact with costs, risks, and benefits. For example, scaling up the system resources to do a one-time comprehensive migration “over a weekend” may be an approach to minimize business impact, but may have high costs and /or not achievable due to volumes. Conversely, breaking down the migration into much smaller efforts, perhaps by application or department, may allow for leveling the costs and squeezing the effort into time windows outside of business hours, but may cause complex system coexistence and integration challenges. We help our insurance clients weigh the pros and cons of all viable approaches to help choose the right migration or conversion path.

Platform leverage

With the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation platform, IBM has carefully brought together a broad, “best in breed” set of capabilities. All their products now integrate to provide full automation functionality on a single, user-friendly platform. For existing IBM insurance clients, upgrading to the platform is a great opportunity to take advantage of additional products and capabilities that allow you to pick your toolset for specific use cases.

And in this case, Pyramid can help you choose the right tool for the right automation job. For example, do you require an external rules-based tool to drive operational intelligence, or should you leverage embedded rules specific to the process or case? Another example is how to best use RPA – on standalone tasks or as an extension of an existing process or case. And yet another is how to enhance and scale your content ingestion strategy using Intelligent Document Processing as digital content and complex unstructured information replaces paper.

Beyond the core capabilities of the platform, additional intelligent services can drive increasing performance and security for insurance companies. Examples include – process mining to discover the highest impact automation targets, event streaming and aggregation for real time response; predictive modeling and suggestive selling to acquire and retain more  customers; and blockchain for trusted data exchange; and more.

From our recent experience talking to dozens of financial services firms that have invested in IBM content management and workflow technologies, it feels like they are all at an inflection point. They believe they need to move forward with new, innovative automation strategies that can drive significant value back to the business. Yet, they struggle at times knowing the best path forward and where they should make their investments. If that describes your situation, we can help.