About This Report

This report is designed to provide insurer CIOs with a broad picture of priorities, activities, and conditions across the industry related to key technology areas across the insurance application infrastructure.

An earlier version of this report was presented and discussed at the January 2010 meetings of the Novarica Insurance Technology Research Council in NYC and Chicago (see pages 54 and 55 for more on the Council and its events).

About the Interviews

Between November 2009 and January 2010, Novarica’s team conducted 30 minute phone interviews with over 90 of the 150 members of the Novarica Insurance Technology Research Council. These interviews were guided by identifying activities and needs related to the areas described by the Novarica Insurance Core Systems Map (see page 8), and followed a conversational flow rather than a formal questionnaire.

Of these 90-plus participants in these interviews, approximately half were midsize P/C companies (under $1 billion in premium), approximately a quarter were large P/C companies, and the remaining quarter were life/annuity companies. Each size/sector grouping was analyzed separately for this report.

About the Contents and Presentation

The first section of this report presents results from a January online poll of 60 Research Council members regarding IT budgets levels for 2010, conducted in January of 2010.

The second section follows the Novarica Insurance Core Systems Map (see page 8). For each area, the report presents:

1. Results of our November 2009 online poll of 94 members of the Research Council, which shows the percentage of participants ranking each area in their top three priorities for 2010. This group of 94 has a majority but inexact overlap with the 90-plus interviews conducted.
2. Common themes, uncommon examples (“outliers”) and illustrative quotes from the 90-plus interviews, with life/annuity discussions summarized in grey boxes on the left and property/casualty discussions summarized in blue boxes on the right. In each case, discussions with larger firms (over $1 billion in premium) are summarized in the top box and smaller firms (between approximately $100 million and $1 billion) in the bottom box.