Improving the Quality of Insurance IT Applications: a Three-Part Series

By Paul Camille Bentz, former CIO, AGF-Allianz

Introduction

Current economic conditions have put insurance companies in a bind. The pressure to recapture pre-2008 revenue and profit margins is intense. But achieving these business goals requires rapidly developing IT applications and enhancing existing ones in ways that escalate IT complexity. This additional complexity makes applications more susceptible to lapses in performance, stability and security. Hence, the very business pressures that require the Insurance IT engine to work flawlessly end up causing that engine to sputter and seize up, making it impossible to achieve revenue and margin goals.

In this three-part series, I will attempt to solve this paradox.Part I will describe the business pressures insurance companies face, and list three ways to address them.

Part II will explain what this means for the IT portfolio - what types of applications are required and how this increases the complexity of the IT portfolio.

Part III will discuss the solution. From my experience as CIO at AFG-Allianz I learned that the complexity problem can be solved if specific software quality problems are resolved. I explain what these specific quality problems are and how we tackled them at AGF-Allianz.

Click here to proceed to Part I.Current economic conditions have put insurance companies in a bind. The pressure to recapture pre-2008 revenue and profit margins is intense. But achieving these business goals requires rapidly developing IT applications and enhancing existing ones in ways that escalate IT complex