Making Metrics Work for You: 5 Tips from the Experts
4. Have a Single Version of the Truth
As with the business side of insurance, in IT there are people whose jobs require them to closely examine one section of the company: policy, claims, billing or marketing, for example. But the downfall of corporate silos is that all aspects of the company must work in concert for maximum efficiency and efficacy.
"There are no standard metrics between insurers or, in many cases, between different departments of the same company," says Roger Paehr, product manager, enterprise services, with HP (Palo Alto, Calif.). "Make sure you are comparing the same things -- particularly when aggregating data. If you don't, you will burn huge amounts of executive time arguing about numbers, and they will all blame IT."
Ferrante says he makes sure he gets data from three key systems: policy, claims and regulatory compliance. "A lot of people don't have those under one department, but because I do, I understand how the data from each one of those sources flows down from our customers, through us, to the regulators," he explains.
"Your efficiencies flow downstream," Ferrante adds. "If you have a lot of data QA problems, that's going to flow down to your regulatory reporting. It results in more errors."
5. Be Consistent
Benchmarking against yourself, as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida's Foley suggests, is important to measure progress. But gaining real insight requires discipline in applying metrics, says Bill Garvey, principal of Eastern Shore Consulting (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Cariers need to resist the urge to allow metrics to creep beyond their purpose, he cautions.
"I like to create very specific milestones in a project," Garvey says. "If it's a [common] maintenance project -- for example, a rate change -- it should be repeatable: 'It takes 30 days to do a rate change.'"
SIDEBAR: What Metrics Do You Use to Measure Your Business?
Jeff Palm, CIO, Allianz Life (Minneapolis): “We have a number of metrics around financial accountability. We also look at the average cost per employee and on- versus off-shore leverage.”
Connie Pilot, CTO, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida (Jacksonville, Fla.): “Percentage of milestones hit, testing and defect rates, change controls, and speed to market.”
Enrico Ferrante, SVP, Business Operations, Sparta (Hartford): “We look at how many policies we’ve issued and canceled; problem logs and how many we closed; and how many maintenance rules, rates and forms we’ve updated from year to year [among other
Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio
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