"The insurance industry can learn from a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre," said Kimberly Harris-Ferrante, vice president and research director of Gartner Inc. A lot of people in the industry, she explained, aren't honest about how broken their processes are. And if they do admit that they have a problem, they still have no clue how, why and when it started. This might be a quote from an American event but it surely applies in London too; only a very few people are prepared to stand up and point out that ‘the Emperor wears no clothes’, everyone else seems to be in denial or maybe they think that there is no ROI to be had from fixing the problems even if they did admit them?

Back to the US: Part of the problem, said Judy Johnson, principal solutions architect at Patni Computer Systems Ltd., is that insurers hold onto the delusion that a company's unique processes can be "competitive differentiators." Instead of separating the industry's wheat from the chaff, though, these different systems only hold the industry back. "We've invested so much religion into the business processes and how we do things," Johnson said. "No wonder we have no IT business alignment." Well, quite!

And it isn't just technological pressures that drive the industry. According to Harris-Ferrante, insurers are subjected to pressures from new customers, economics, the environment and regulation.

Insurers and IT vendors have the buzzwords: speed, agility, transparency and convergence to confront these drivers. But these buzzwords may only be catchy sales pitches at best. At worst, vendors and the industry may not even be using the same dictionary.
"The insurance companies are so bad at communicating what they need," said Chad Hersh, a senior analyst with Celent Communications LLP, "that they end up with a product that's not what it's supposed to be. At the end of the day, nobody is happy." This is a common ‘stand off’ between IT and the business; the business blames IT for being late, expensive and un-responsive and IT blames the business for changing their mind and inability to communicate what they want.

"Most of us know we're broken," agreed Chuck Johnston, director of compensation management for Siebel Systems. "For an industry that focuses on risk management, we're really not good at quantifying these things."

Still, some companies have come up to speed, according to Johnston, adapting their processes to today's whirling cycle of business drivers.
Success can be seen on the vendor side as well. "Technologies are really starting to converge," said Patni's Johnson, "and people are learning how to package them to help people be able to run their businesses better."

Herein lays the answer. A COO said to me the other day ‘there is no such thing as an IT project’ and he is right in the sense that IT should do projects to service the business, not for technology sake; but business has a responsibility here too. Their responsibility is to articulate their strategy (or derive a strategy!) and work with IT to determine what part technology plays in fulfilling that strategy.