Business Intelligence Strategies for the CIOIn the trenches: Benefits and pitfalls of deploying a BI system
Date: Dec 15, 2010At many companies, basic reporting or Excel-based business intelligence is the BI reality. The latter was the case at American Access Casualty Co., an auto insurer that had lots of pricing-related data but not in a form that was very useful, according to Kevin Rooney, formerly its CIO and now chief strategy officer.
“You could walk into our pricing analysts’ offices and see that they were buried in spreadsheets,” Rooney said during a keynote speech at last month’s TDWI World Conference in Orlando. “But the information wasn’t timely, and it was very siloed.” Analyzing what the company’s competitors were doing in the market and whether American Access should respond was a difficult prospect, he added.
In mid-2009, officials at the Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based insurer decided that it was time to invest in a more structured business intelligence process. As CIO, Rooney led the deployment of a cloud-based BI system that includes a mix of internal data, U.S. census information and external auto insurance pricing records. Rooney said the BI system enables the pricing analysts to examine hundreds of millions of price points and generates real-time alerts when rivals change their rates, creating the potential to analyze information and answer competitive questions much more quickly than the company could do before.
But the expanded analytics capabilities didn’t come easy. After a 60-day proof-of-concept project and a four-month effort to quantify the BI system’s potential value and finalize the project plan, it took American Access nearly another 12 months to get to the point of filing proposed new pricing rates developed with the help of the system. And that’s in just one of the five states where the company currently does business.
In a video interview with SearchBusinessAnalytics.com after his conference keynote, Rooney discussed the rollout of the BI system, which utilizes Kognitio Ltd.’s analytic database and batch pricing software from Quomation Insurance Services Inc. Rooney detailed the system’s expected benefits as well as the challenges that American Access faced on the project and how it worked to overcome them.
Viewers of the seven-minute video will:
- Hear what the BI system enables American Access to do that it couldn’t do before.
- Get Rooney’s take on the importance of asking not just what new technologies can do but why an organization should invest in them.
- See what the answer to that question was for his company in the case of the BI system.
- Find out why American Access decided to go with a cloud-based approach to BI.
- Learn about the bumps that the insurer hit on the project and how it responded to them.
- Hear about the current status of the BI system and its projected benefits.
- Get advice from Rooney on deploying new BI and analytics systems.
- Discover what his new job as chief strategy officer at American Access involves.
Join the conversationComment
Share
Comments
Results
Contribute to the conversation