"The real challenge is to make the BI environment an integral part of the decision making process"
What is the most important pre-requisite to survive in today's volatile marketplace? The answer is rather straightforward-'Information', or more precisely, 'Actionable Information'. For example, let's consider insurance industry, which is almost totally dependent on current and insightful information. Consolidation and new competitors, globalization, product convergence, channel proliferation, new approaches to customer relationship management-these sweeping changes generate significant big-data problems for large insurers. Leveraging customer data is key as insurers rapidly shift their attention to differentiation based on customer acquisition and retention rather than product offerings. Integrating the e-business channel into existing legacy applications and achieving operational efficiencies are also important imperatives for large insurers, especially those who want to integrate offerings across product lines or business units as a strategic business goal.
A close look at the insurance value chain suggests that Business Intelligence (BI) can play a crucial role in almost every aspect of the chain. It can help identify the right customers for target marketing and analyze the reasons for customer attrition. It can help the insurer better manage its agents and sales force and improve the effectiveness of actuarial and underwriting functions. BI forms the most critical component of claims management, helping in fraud selection and claims estimation. On the asset management side, it can lower the insurer's risk through sophisticated risk models developed using data mining tools. And most importantly, BI tools can help insurers provide crucial information to corporate clients, which can go a long way in cementing the insurer's relations with the clients.
The insurance industry is extremely divided in its adoption of business intelligence environment based on technologies like data warehousing, OLAP and data mining. Quite a few insurance companies are in an advanced stage of their business intelligence initiative; yet there are many that are oblivious of its benefits. Some insurers have gone for non-scalable temporary solutions, which often fail to leverage the ever-increasing volumes of data. Hence, recognizing the need for an effective business intelligence environment based on the right architecture is vital. But it is just the first step. The real challenge is to make the BI environment an integral part of the decision making process. Efficiently gathering the information requirements of all the user-groups is thus extremely critical for the success of any data warehouse. The belief that "you build it, they will use it" is wrong. Also a data warehouse can not be the answer to all the information requirements; hence it is also very important to set clear business objectives for the business intelligence solution with total top management support.
Expedien's Business Intelligence practice is uniquely qualified to implement high-performance data warehousing, enterprise data integration with a focus on legacy mart integration that integrate e-business applications with legacy data applications, and house holding solutions.
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