I recently had the pleasure of hosting a webinar with risk professionals from Beecher Carlson and Gallagher Bassett. The focus of our conversation centered on the technological revolution so many of us have experienced in our personal lives, while essentially being stuck in a technological rut in our professional lives. The good news is companies have started paying attention—realizing that not keeping pace with the evolution of technology can come at a high price.

Professionals in the insurance industry are not strangers to this technology gap—especially when it comes to the legacy technology often used to manage risk, claims, insurance policies and safety. In fact, this gap is what spurred my co-panelists Beecher Carlson and Gallagher Bassett to shift away from their legacy systems—freeing up the tremendous amount of resources required to develop and maintain their former in-house solutions.

They highlighted some of the benefits they’ve experienced since transitioning to a modern web-based risk management information system from an outside vendor:

• Collaboration and transparency because of the fluid exchange of accurate and timely data among disparate internal and external systems
• Increased computing power, improved security and reduced IT costs—thanks to the cloud-based nature of their systems and decreased dependence on maintaining internal servers.
• Efficiencies from having an intuitive, easy-to-modify system that can easily configure workflows.

Beecher Carlson and Gallagher Bassett also dispelled common misconceptions that evolved RMIS technology is prohibitively expensive; time consuming and cumbersome to deploy; and provides only marginal ROI.

At the heart of a risk manager’s job is to understand at a granular level the potential impact of any exposure to his or her organization—whether that’s a claim, incident, property, department, policy, program, carrier, employee, vehicle, inspection or report.

Yet, too many people are making multi-million dollar insurance decisions based on data cobbled together from multiple sources, rekeyed into spreadsheets and analyzed in the few remaining days or hours before a renewal. It simply doesn’t have to be this way.

If any of this resonates, contact us to learn how the RMIS evolution can evolve how you do your job.