One of the best things about being at DIALOG was the opportunity to meet a bunch of ILOG customers and learn how they are making better decisions in their organizations. It seems to me that every one of these customers is, in a very practical way, helping to build a smarter planet. The first group [...]
Insurance
Another panel, this time on how business rules fits into an agile IT infrastructure. British Airways, PMI (mortgage related services), Swiss Medical (Argentinian health insurance) and Wyndham Group were represented. Panels are tough to blog so here’s a list of takeaways: Start small and in a well known area to prove out the technology but [...]
Gerhard Hausmann presented on Barmenia and their use of business rules to improve customer experience. Barmenia is a private health / life insurance company in Germany with more than 2M contracts and 1.5Bn Euros in premiums. Been in business since 1904 and still have contracts that date back to the last century. In Germany there [...]
Like millions of my fellow Americans I listened to our new President today. As I did I was struck by the opportunities for decision management to deliver the smarter systems that will be critical with some of the priorities President Obama laid out in his speech. There were four commitments he made that struck me [...]
I was struck by an article on Insurance and Technology titled All Predictive Models Are Wrong. Now, while this is a true statement (more or less) it reminds me of a famous Winston Churchil quote: It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. [...]
Charlie Berger and some others presented on using data mining for fraud detection. Fraud is a huge issue – for instance there is $31B annually in insurance claims fraud (10-15%) with 25% of all claims have some fraud and more than 1 in 3 bodily-injury claims from car crashes involving fraud. Other industries have similar [...]
I was chatting with someone the other day who shared a story of a European health insurer. Their decision-making in claims looked only at the validity of the claim and nothing else. This of course created a situation where good (and very profitable customers) could be treated correctly but ineffectively – such as one [...]
Two gentlemen from Deloitte presented Integrating Predictive Analytics and BRM to Improve Health Plan Member Experience. 80% of healthcare costs are incurred by 20% of members and traditionally the 20% get all the focus. Analytics and data mining get applied to claims, authorization, costs as a result. Segmentation focuses on the unprofitable and unhealthy. Increasingly [...]
Chubb has been working with Blaze Advisor to automate a number of decisions. They began with specialty lines underwriting (automated renewals), claims severity calculation and work queue assignment. Current focus is on integrating predictive models and some legacy modernization. The automated renewals project reduced the time to make renewal rule changes from 3-6 months of [...]
After lunch I joined the Insurance track and listened to Don Light of Celent (who wrote this nice paper some time ago) and Mike Gordon of Fair Isaac. Mike started and his first slide was headlined “survival of the fittest” which seems like the right headline! There is clearly a lot on in insurance these [...]
Evening of Monday night and its party time in the solutions area of IMPACT. Once again the wonderful string quartet were strutting their electric stuff and the food and drinks were good. I spent my time speaking to the few folks present who were really interested in decisioning (Chordiant, ILOG, select IBMers) and then went [...]
First session today was some folks from Allstate Financial talking about the Impact of Service Oriented Architecture on Data Modeling: A Case Study. AllState Financial has the large number of data sources typical of a large corporation. Each line of business has its own administrative systems and mergers and acquisitions also create new data sources. [...]
At least it’s blog cannot. I saw this post by my old friend Paul Vincent – Business rule execution: stateless/transactional, stateful/monitoring, or both? and tried to comment on it. Sadly the Tibco blog can’t add 6 and 2 and so rejected my comment (the sum was spam protection). So here’s my comment: I am not [...]
Silverlink is an interesting company whose approach is to apply science to drive healthcare behaviors in a scalable manner. They made some announcements today at the Health 2.0 conference. I recently got a chance to speak with the CEO (Stan Nowak) and his team. Silverlink has 50 healthcare clients representing 150 million lives (including 9 [...]
Last session of the day was from Rodolfo Viola of Swiss Medical Argentina on Breakthrough in Claims Excellence Management. Claims is, of course, a prime target for rules-based automation so I was excited to hear how an organization outside of North America/Europe was handling it. Swiss Medical is a privately owned company founded as a [...]
One of the most interesting uses of enterprise decision management or EDM is in automating detection of various kinds of “bad” activity. Whether the concern du jour is insider trading, money laundering or just plain old fraud. There are a number of reasons why EDM is such a powerful approach. Automation is fundamentally the best [...]
Alan Weiss of Travelers and Brian Stucky of InScope presented on Reaping the Benefits of Rules through SOA and Business Rule Management at Travelers. Travelers is a Fortune 100 insurance carrier and Alan is part of a group focused on moving control over processing into the business. The key purpose of business rules in this [...]
Paul Armborst, someone I have known for a long time, was up after lunch talking on True Adventures in Business Rules. Paul is from Westfield Group, a top 50 insurance company based in Ohio. Back in the 1990s needed to transform their business – from a mainframe/back office company to one where agents could serve [...]
Jamie Bisker was up after lunch talking about Insurance 2020: Innovating Beyond Old Models. Jamie used to be a Tower Group analyst and now works for IBM in their Institute for Business Value (I blogged about his reports before). Studied future customers and their needs, how automation is flattening the competitive environment, what fundamental trends [...]
[amazonify]1422103323:right[/amazonify][amazonify]1422103323::text::::Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning[/amazonify] by Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris Tom and Jeanne have written a new book (building on a paper they wrote some time ago) about what they call “analytic competitors”, that is to say companies that use their analytic prowess not just to enhance their operations but as [...]
