It's Christmas: Time to Talk about Wars

(Posted by Guest Blogger, and James's little helper elf, Ian Turvill.)

I posted earlier this year about a keynote speech delivered at the ISOTECH conference.  In it, I relayed how Frank Coyne, Chairman and CEO of ISO stated:

"...breakthroughs in analytics are transforming dynamics in insurance markets.  Sophisticated insurers able to harness large volumes of high-quality data to drive decisioning all along the value creation chain can look forward to a long and prosperous future. But insurers unable to keep up in the intellectual and technological arms race face a grim prognosis."  [my emphasis]

I have explored and considerably expanded on this theme in the third and final article in my series entitled "The 21st Century Insurer" in Fair Isaac's online ViewPoints magazine.  In it, I argue that one of the most important things that an insurer can do to best position itself and win this both the "intellectual and technological arms race" is to break out the management and execution of decisions from other core functions in the business.

You can read it and the other two articles in the series by clicking on the links below:

• The 21st century insurer Part 1: Beyond price—Successful responses to shrinking opportunities  Introduces new predictive analytics approaches that insurers can adopt to overcome price-based competition
• The 21st Century insurer Part 2: A smarter way to beat the competition Explains how the practice of decision analytics can help insurers optimize across a much broader range of factors when designing rating structures
• The 21st century insurer Part 3: Break out decisions for breakthrough performance  Describes how the concept of a centralized Decision Service can dramatically improve the development and execution of decision strategies

(Somewhat shameless commerce:) If you would like to subscribe to future issues of ViewPoints, please click here.

Addendum: 12/26/2006

I was asked by "bee" to contribute a little more depth to this article (see comments below).  The additional materials I'm posting are (unfortunately) of a more commercial nature, since they illustrate the points I've made in these articles in ways that rely on specific Fair Isaac solutions.  Nevertheless, I think the general principles that are set out here would apply if any commensurately capable solution were applied.

More information on the ROI of a centralized decision service:  Download IDC_ROI_paper.pdf

More information on the use of a decision service as part of an Enterprise Service Bus or Service Oriented Architecture: Download soa_and_rules_wp.pdf

For more details on the optimization techniques described in Part 2, see: Download decision_analytics_white_paper.pdf and Download optimization_white_paper.pdf