Managing data a key challenge for insurance companies: Celent report

“Data mastery” has been one of the Top 3 insurance priorities for the past several years, yet most insurers still struggle with how best to use their own information to achieve their business goals, research firm Celent says.

Celent’s report, Data Mastery Spectrum Overview 2012, defines the concept as “mastery of data available to an insurer that allows it to use data, both internally and externally, to gain business insight and improve decisioning in all aspects of the business.”

The various components of data mastery include business intelligence (BI) presentation, analytics, data warehouse, extract, transform, load (ETL) component solutions and BI content such as insurance data models, dashboard and report templates.

Celent notes that competitive pressures are forcing insurers to focus on the use of data to achieve tangible business goals.

“Successful insurers today utilize a mature insurance data model that allows them to solve a particular business problem or opportunity and grow with future data mastery endeavors,” the report states.

“Due to competitive forces, insurers must be able to see and act on business insight in a few months and not years. Insurers need to be able to leverage both internal and external data, as well as grow their use and maturity of big data quickly in an agile manner.”

Celent also notes that data analytics is evolving and “those insurers that can best leverage both their internal and external data will be the leaders by 2020.”