Boston, MA, USA
November 27, 2006Insurance
CIO/CTO Pressures, Priorities, Projects, and Plans for 2007: Survey
Results
Report Published by Celent
Celent’s fourth annual survey of senior
IT executives finds increased focus on strategic spending to meet market
demands and some concern over a softening property/casualty market.
In the fall of 2006, Celent surveyed 29 insurer
senior IT executives to provide a deep information resource about
priorities, behaviors, initiatives, and infrastructures at US insurers.
Overall, the respondents represented US$50 billion in premium, or roughly
5% of the total US insurance market.
“There is continued focus on meeting market
demands for speed to market and ease of doing business, and on new
projects involving core systems, data mastery, and distribution,” says Matthew
Josefowicz, manager of Celent’s insurance group and author of the
report, Insurance CIO/CTO Pressures, Priorities, Projects, and Plans for
2007: Survey Results. “Budgets and staffs are generally flat or growing
modestly, but strategic investments continue. However, there are some
indications that large P/C insurers may be keeping their powder dry until
they can gauge the impact of the softening market.”
Other key findings include:
Top areas of significant new project spending
vary by size and sector, but include initiatives focused on underwriting,
claims, product development, and data mastery. Document handling,
policy administration system replacement, ACORD XML adoption, and agent
portals, and BPM all show up among the most common areas of significant
new project spending. The report lists the top areas of “significant”
and “some” new project spending by four size-and-sector groups of
insurer respondents.
Web services/SOA is real. Adoption
of enterprise service buses and UDDI infrastructures may not yet be
widespread, but the average insurer had approximately 15 services live
within its enterprise, and about half of the sample is using Web services/SOA
for internal and external integration to enable new business and
underwriting. ACORD XML continues to play a role in more than half of
these initiatives.
The incremental mainframe migration is
continuing, and Linux is becoming an important element of platform
modernization along with Windows. While most large insurers rely on at
least partially on mainframes for their core policy systems, the overall
role of mainframes continues to wane gradually.
The 56-page report covers a broad range of
areas, including detailed budget breakdowns, staffing plans and ratios,
and an analysis of insurer activity in over 70 specific technology
initiatives ranging from direct online sales to core systems to specific
deployments of business process management and document management
systems. The report contains 41 figures analyzing survey responses.
A table of
contents and a list of figures are
available online.
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