EDM Could Be a Fix for the Aging Insurer Population

Thanks to George Grieve of the P&C Technology Blog for his shout out on my recent article about the need to capture the expertise of insurance underwriters (and presumably, too, managers and executives in other insurance functions).  I just want to relay some of the interesting facts that George presented in his own posting.  These are drawn from a recent webinar presented by the CPCU Society.

• 84% of CPCUs and 70% of adjusters are over 40 years old today
• COBOL training is found in less than 5% of college computer science programs

So, George's point is that not only is the expertise not going to be around, but even where the expertise may have formalized in the form of computer code, it is not going to be accessible to the IT professionals that are coming into employment.

This sounds like yet another argument for Enterprise Decision Management.  EDM can abstract or externalize the policies that form the basis for decision making, removing them from the COBOL morass.  EDM can place the policies into the hands of business users, freeing what limited COBOL programming resources exist to focus on essential application maintenance, rather than making day-to-day changes that are necessary to preserve agility.

Thanks, George, for bringing these data to the fore!