The webinar is co-sponsored by Appian’s insurance solution partner, MajeskoMastek. MajescoMastek has teamed with Appian around a series of templates and frameworks to accelerate implementation of crucial BPM for Insurance solutions.

An insurance provider’s real path to profitability and sustainable market share gains is to focus on giving customers (and agents) a great experience.  That requires an IT infrastructure that delivers efficiency and effectiveness, as well as the native mobility and ease of social communication/collaboration that customers simply expect.

The problem is that legacy systems, or new systems done traditionally, are very expensive and have lengthy deployment times which increase risk. Leading insurers are increasingly looking to a new breed of technology – BPM software – that can be used to replace core systems and/or “wrap” existing applications. BPM “renovates” IT for immediate benefit and without risky timelines.

Attend the webinar to get actionable insights on:

• How BPM can eliminate manual processes, fill gaps, and address unmet customer needs
• BPM’s role in Claims, Underwriting, Policy & Admin, New Products and more
• Starting fast and reducing risk through cloud BPM
• How Mobile and Social BPM drive customer engagement and reduce churn

Register now and get the information you need to ensure your organization’s success.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

But a closer inspection of Guidewire, made possible through their IPO regulatory filings, shows their solutions are novel only in comparison to the ancient IT systems and paper-based processes used extensively by P&C insurers today.  Guidewire is a big advance over those, but only a few steps in the BPM direction.

First, let me share my congratulations to the Guidewire team.  They created software that’s leaps and bounds ahead of what is in use at most insurers.  They have 103 of the more than 7,000 P&C insurers around the globe using their products and solving real problems.  Well done!

Guidewire’s products address some of the most significant pains insurers have today.  Here’s an example.  Inadequate data capture and ineffective process controls in legacy systems lead to real costs such as “claims leakage.”  Claims leakage is where the amount paid on a claim exceeds the amount to which a claimant is entitled.  It is a prevalent problem, accounting for 4-6% of claim payments.  That’s $50 billion lost annually across the industry.  Claims leakage is entirely preventable.  If fixed, it would improve insurance carriers’ operating incomes by the same 4-6% as claim amounts paid improperly would otherwise drop to the bottom line.

Going after big expense gaps like claims leakage is very enticing, but only if a solution can be put in place quickly, cost effectively, and without disrupting operations.  Here’s where the bloom starts to come off Guidewire’s rose, as evidenced by facts and statements within their IPO filing.

Guidewire promotes that they have an “innovative modern software platform” that allows business rules, workflows, and user interfaces to be configured “without modification of the underlying code base, allowing customers to easily make changes in response to specific, evolving business needs.”

If I were a leader at an insurance company, that message would strike home and I’d be ready to sign up.  I’d want easily configurable software operating in all core functions across my enterprise as quickly as possible.  But the reality behind that vision is not so pretty.

Here are some important things prospective Guidewire clients should know that come straight out of their IPO document:

• “We sometimes commit to include specific functions in our base product offering at the request of a customer or group(s) of customers…. providing this additional functionality may be time consuming.” Sounds like you’re still beholden to a software vendor’s roadmap to get functionality you want.  Not everything can be configured by you to fit your business.
•  “Implementation and testing of our products by our customers lasts 6 to 24 months… depending upon the nature and complexity of our customers’ systems the implementation and testing of our products may take significantly longer than 24 months.”  This is definitely not off-the-shelf software.  Any value realized will be delayed a long time… and cost lots as you pay for consultants to do the implementation.
• “We have designed our applications based on our in-depth understanding of the P&C insurance industry.”  Guidewire’s products reflect the vendor’s understanding of your business, not your own.  Whatever they develop, and whatever specialization you request that ends up back in their product, becomes available to all your competitors.  Commoditization is becoming rampant in insurance.  The only way to be consistently profitable is to have unique capabilities and processes that you run your entire business upon.  It’s hard to be unique when you’re working with software designed for all insurance companies and in use by your competitors.
• “[Our] licenses are priced based on the amount of direct written premiums that will be managed by our solutions.”  So the more you use them, the more you pay.  Combine that with long implementations and you’re looking at expensive solutions that lack natural economies of scale.

The pains in P&C insurance that Guidewire addresses are clear and acute.  Their solution is definitely an improvement, but follows the old model of enterprise software requiring large “rip and replace” transformations of systems which are highly risky.  The IPO document notes that most customers have only deployed Guidewire for claims which mean the rest of their systems are still siloed and full of legacy code.  It also means full transformations will take a long time.  It’s not uncommon to find insurers 3-4 years into a full transformation and only at the half-way mark.

What insurers need is a faster way to get the same benefits Guidewire promotes, but with less risk, less time delay, and much less cost.  They need a platform upon which they can create whatever applications they want, built entirely around their unique processes and preserving their competitive advantages.  That platform needs to be able to “wrap and extend” existing applications to avoid highly risky wholesale replacement.  It also needs to have a licensing model that provides economies of scale making subsequent development and deployment less expensive, not linearly additive.  It also needs to provide an environment where users can access all enterprise applications, whether written in the platform or not, and from any desktop or mobile platform.

Any insurers interested in the value Guidewire targets need to recognize their solutions are only a few steps down the path that business process management (BPM) has already traveled.  Appian is seeing great adoption in BPM for insurance because we offer the most modern BPM platform that allows for rapid, iterative development of applications, a complete social BPM environment to foster communication and action, and mobile BPM so that any process can also be a mobile process.

Before you embark on a transformation that could be years-long and leave your operations exposed, consider the old saying, “the only things you find in the middle of the road are yellow streaks and dead skunks.”  Take a close look at how adopting BPM for insurance could get you the same benefits in less time with fewer risks and a lower price tag, keeping you from being exposed in the middle of crossing the road.

To learn more, please download my whitepaper titled “BPM for Insurance:  Four Paths to Outdistancing Your Competition” and join us for a webinar on February 16^th titled “Fueling Insurance Provider Success with BPM” featuring Ellen Carney from Forrester Research.

Evan McDonnell

Vice President of Solutions

Here are some startling facts:

ERP software maintenance fees alone “represented one-third if enterprise IT software budgets in 2010, with license fees accounting for another 25%.” That’s right: just keeping the ERP lights on eats up more than half of the total IT budget.

Perhaps that would be acceptable if ERP software delivered what the business needs today, but Craig shows that it clearly does not. Of ERP and other monolithic packaged apps he states, “These systems have developed inflexible architectures and have become aligned with silos built around business functions that now present a serious barrier to many fast-moving companies.” In other words, the limited extensibility of those apps leaves them stuck in business silos that they then help perpetuate, while required business functions existing in the white space between packaged apps continues to be paper- and email-based, cumbersome and non-standardized.

What’s the Conclusion?

Craig states that, “Enterprises that deployed ERP six to nine years ago are now questioning the budget for upgrades – and they should.” Business has changed dramatically in that time – and the rate of change is increasing. The business “wants more value and is reluctant to invest just to maintain functionality that many already view as lacking.”

What’s the Alternative?

Craig says that what’s required is a “Process-first Perspective” based on “an outside-in focus that starts with the needs of the customer.” To paraphrase again: build your business processes based on what’s going to optimize the customer experience, not based on the limited capabilities of your packaged apps.

How Do You Get There?

Do you need to take a jackhammer to the cement (or concrete) for a massive “rip and replace”? Luckily, no (have you ever used a jackhammer? It’s hard and slow work.). Instead, you can get the new and flexible functionality you need, and breathe new life into those legacy systems, by overlaying your packaged apps with a flexible process layer. In Craig’s words, “In the future, companies will address process and application gaps not by customizing on-premises software, but by linking best-of-breed applications using accessible and adaptable processes built on top of Dynamic Case Management or BPM Suites.”

What’s the Next Step?

Modern BPM software, with native mobile and social capabilities, is creating a seismic shift in corporate IT. Contact Appian to learn more about removing the concrete shoes.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

In the article, Kate talks about the importance of knowing your customer, knowing how they like to communicate, and providing a consistent experience across all possible channels. BPM software’s value in stitching together disparate enterprise silos is well established, but Social BPM extends that value to the new world of social media. One powerful aspect of the Appian Tempo social interface is that is can incorporate social channels like Twitter into a business event feed. This gives companies an easy way to know when its customers are talking about the company – and that knowledge can be fed directly into process so that appropriate action can be taken in real-time. With peer-to-peer social dialogue on the rise, corporate marketing is no longer the generator and controller of the message. What matters now is knowing what conversations are happening, and having the business agility to participate.

Social BPM is more than just “social” because in addition to enabling direct customer conversations and collaborations – which any social enterprise platform can do – it also provides the means to track those interactions, keep them as an audit trail in the customer case, and learn from them to improve the product and service experience.

Disintermediation of the message is only one part of the equation. There’s also the proliferation of media platforms. As Kate points out, “Your service experience should let customers start an interaction over one communication channel and complete it over another. To make this happen, CIOs must ensure that channels are not implemented in silos, but are integrated so that agents have a full view of all customer interactions.” We’re past phone and email. Consumers are increasingly using new channels – particularly mobile platforms. This is where Mobile BPM becomes vital to an integrated strategy. By providing a native mobile app to consumers that is tied to enterprise process – the same processes running the call centers and web service platforms – consistent cross-platform service becomes a reality, not a pipe dream.

This holistic process and data exposure is equally key to another of Kate’s main points: making sure service reps are armed with the data they need to deliver a stellar customer experience. “Customer service systems must be more than just the front end of a database of customer information and cases,” she says. “They should also be integrated with back office applications so that agents can retrieve real-time answers to questions such as ‘when did my order ship?’”

This is where real-time data access within mobile and social process is crucial. And not just for reps in the call center. Field service personnel need it. The field sales force needs it. Any employee who comes into contact with a customer needs it.

Mobile and Social BPM are integral to the customer service strategies of the future. They are lynchpins in moving from a “system of record” mentality to a “system of engagement” mindset that will exceed customer expectations.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

The report uses data from a Forrester survey of insurance IT decision makers that highlights revenue growth as the #1 industry priority. Ellen cites that “innovation is viewed as a channel to revenue” because harnessing mobility and social into insurance business models will directly impact the customer experience. She says, “Mobile has changed the way we envision an insurance company…This change means that initiatives to deliver sales and customer service business capabilities must be mobiled. Social media are also maturing into a means to improve collaboration within the insurance ecosystem.”

This is precisely what Appian BPM is enabling our insurance customers to do. By putting full-featured process solutions as native apps on all popular mobile platforms, and utilizing a modern social interface, we are helping transform the industry. As Brian Flynn, global CIO at Crawford & Company has said, “The Appian BPM Suite, with its mobile and social capabilities, is truly an enabler that will change the way we work with our business partners and ultimately how we service our clients.”

What’s more, Appian also helps achieve the persistent objective of cost reduction by delivering those native mobile and social apps with ZERO additional development cost. This is above and beyond BPM’s traditional value in delivering, as the report says, “faster and cheaper processing of claims and disbursements, while ensuring that they’re paying claims the right way.”

Appian BPM precisely fits Ellen’s definition of the changing insurance IT landscape, where CIOs are moving from a limited focus on operations and cost containment to one in which “the role of technology is integral to support these new business disruptions.”

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Mobile app development is expensive, and a potential governance nightmare. But it doesn’t have to be.

A single mobile enterprise app is costly to develop (anywhere from $50K to $150K, by estimates). Now multiply that by the number of applications in your business. And that’s just to develop on one platform. Mobile Apps require specialized skills across numerous platforms that are constantly updating. With Appian’s Mobile BPM you take a huge bite out of that cost, time and skills equation. Extra development cost goes to zero, as any app created on the Appian platform becomes a native mobile app simply through a series of check boxes. Appian’s code-free composition means you compose a process application once and automatically publish it, with full native mobile capabilities, to every popular device platform.

The management headaches are another significant hurdle. In a blog post on ZDNet, Ted points out that already, 35% of US information workers use a smartphone for work. What should your device management policy be? How do you know the platform(s) your company chooses to support will still be leading the market (or even in the market) five years from now? Further, employees increasingly use their personal mobile devices for work, regardless of any official device policy (if one even exists). With Appian, you don’t have to choose. iOS, Android and RIM are all natively – and automatically – supported. And as the mobile platform market continues to evolve, Appian will adjust accordingly.

Mobile app development is becoming a must in the enterprise. The demographic trend is gaining force, and the clear business value afforded by mobility is starting to be realized. Corporate business and IT leaders (and their IT staff) are struggling to keep up with mobile workers’ expectations. Appian can remove some significant and complex obstacles. Read more in our white paper, “Business Agility in the Mobile Age.”

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

Gartner’s Daryl Plummer is a Managing Vice President, Chief of Research and Chief Gartner Fellow. He is Chief of Research for cloud computing and Chief of Research for emerging trends. He will open your eyes about the challenges and opportunities for putting mission-critical processes in the cloud.

Clay Richardson, Senior Analyst at Forrester, is a BPM thought leader. His recent research around the ROI of BPM suites – and how to maximize it – will inform his Day 2 keynote.

Sandy Kemsley is recognized as a leading independent BPM analyst, and her Column 2 blog is a must-read for the community. Sandy will deliver a keynote on the business and cultural changes that are enabled by social BPM technologies.

Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director at MWD Advisors, is one of the UK’s BPM luminaries. He will discuss BPM for Case Management best practices. He will also lead a panel discussion on BPM Centers of Excellence, and their role in building a high-value program.

Don’t miss this opportunity! Register today.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

The traditional view of BPM software – that it reduces cost through automation – is giving way to a larger understanding of BPM’s value for transforming the customer experience. In this new age of customer empowerment, sophisticated mobile devices and global social networking are changing the nature of what organizations must do to connect with, sell to and retain customers. Mobile BPM and Social BPM are becoming integral to a company’s ability to compete.

Nick runs one of the largest and most successful BPM programs in the world. His efforts have been rewarded through numerous industry accolades and many millions in annual ROI for his company. He is truly a BPM visionary AND practitioner (a relatively rare combination).

Speaking of visionary practitioners, David Carpenter, Director of BPM at Archstone, will also be presenting at the conference during Appian’s VIP lunch session. After an introduction by Forrester analyst Clay Richardson, David will discuss “Extending BPM in the Mobile Age.” He will deliver a case study on empowering front-line employees to deliver customer service excellence, will also talk about Archstone’s move into the new frontier of Mobile BPM.

Both sessions are on the first day of the conference. Nick’s Keynote is open to all, but seating is limited for David’s session. To attend that one, contact the Forrester Events Team at events@forrester.com.

While you are at the conference, visit Appian in Booth 3 to view a live demonstration of our the software making both these organizations so successful – the Appian BPM Suite. You can also enter our raffle for a Bose headset.

We hope to see you there!

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

The discussion (and the related report) centered on whether enterprise applications are up to the challenge of transforming a business to meet the requirements of a new world of customer empowerment. While the analysts couched their opinions as being part of an on-going and raging debate, their answers ultimately appear to be a unanimous “no.” William Bland, an expert on Customer Relationship Management stated that “CRM apps, as they are currently constituted, are not really suitable for transforming the way a company does business.” This echoes the general opinion of the panel that while enterprise applications like CRM and ERP can impart best practices for efficiency, they cannot deliver the flexibility needed to address rapidly changing business models, unique customer experiences and dynamic business processes.

In short, traditional enterprise applications “are not so good for creating transformative change.” That effort requires business process-centric solutions.

Derek Miers extended this line of thinking to a discussion of Dynamic Case Management (read Forrester’s DCM Wave report here), which he said delivers the level of flexibility that “is a critical enabler of customer-driven transformation.” Craig Le Clair put a fine-point on it by stating that “we’re in a period where change driven by consumer technology is so vast and so rapid that the focus on process transformation must be more acute. I don’t think enterprise app systems can participate in that transformation because they were never built for that.”

In fact, going back to the notion that this point is being debated at all, Craig clarified it is not a question of whether, but simply of when:

“The debate we have internally within Forrester pertains to how much of a barrier to innovation these large enterprise suites will be…[I]t’s going to be left to other game-changing technologies…The only question is how fast it will accelerate.”

Download the full report from Connie’s blog to learn more. Then, contact Appian to see how our game-changing Mobile BPM, Cloud BPM and Social BPM can empower your organization to create value from a new world of emppowered customers.

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

According to the report, BPM suites deliver a range of business benefits in addition to pure cost-cutting:

“Instead of deploying slow-to-change packaged applications or building difficult-to-change custom solutions, leading organizations embrace BPM methodologies — supported by BPM suites — that drive rapid process change, increased business engagement, and dramatic improvements in worker productivity [as well as] driving greater process orientation, improving the customer experience, and accelerating the integration of merged and acquired companies.”

Appian customer Nick Deacon, global head of Business Process Management at Nokia Siemens Networks, is quoted in the report citing BPM software as a new, faster and less-costly alternative to traditional application development:

“One of our business teams received a quote from a systems integrator (SI) for nine months of development at a cost of $1.2 million to extend a particular process within one of our packaged applications. Our BPM team also reviewed the requirements and was able to deliver the same functionality over a three-month period at one-quarter of the cost quoted by the SI. We believe that much of the savings came from the BPM suite’s model-driven approach, which allowed us to quickly engage business stakeholders.”

The report also outlines the common costs of implementing a BPM suite. The top two are software license costs and maintenance fees. Appian is cited for offering full-featured BPM in the cloud – eliminating both the up-front license investment and the ongoing maintenance. The three most common reasons for BPM suite project failure are also noted:

• Inability to establish the proper business context for BPM
• Shortage of BPM skills
• Lack of planning for business change management

Addressing these issues at the outset of a BPM initiative will greatly increase your chances of success, and will position you to heed the report’s advice to “go all in with BPM suites to gain the greatest benefits.”

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications