Risk Management-as-a-Service? Everything else seems to be!

There are a number of insurance and risk management technology meetings going on this time of year.  It seems the product headlines are dominated by announcements of new Business Intelligence (analytics), Self-Service Portals and new mobility offerings.  All of these new or enhanced “widgets” are very cool, but the question on many CIO’s minds is whether it is time for their business to move to the proverbial “cloud”.  Insurance and Risk Management folks are notorious “late adopters”, so while Salesforce.com revolutionized CRM several years ago, the world of insurance processing and management just now seems to be getting serious about looking at the various “as-a-service” offerings.

Great commentary by Peter Allen about how the “As-a-Service” shift in IT could have as much of an impact as the Internet did over a decade ago:

The delivery models for IT and IT-enabled business functions are being transformed in radical ways. The “old world” approaches of complex development, integration and provisioning that were intensive in terms of capital (human and financial), and lacking efficiency in leverage, are being sacrificed at the altar of mobility, big data, ubiquitous networking, cybersecurity, and virtualization.

 The IT industry – in terms of product and services providers – is being reformed in real-time.  Those players that are betrothed to legacy business models, such as staff augmentation, commodity-oriented computing capacity, or consulting-heavy systems deployment, are facing headwinds unlike anything seen before.  Their offerings aren’t nearly as relevant in the “As-a-Service” economy. 

The reasons are rather straightforward.  If you’re in the business of “how” rather than “what,” then your value is marginal and replaceable.  “As-a-Service” is all about “what” the services and business functions entail.

The “As-a-Service” economy will shift spend profiles, technology stacks, and business relationships in ways that are not yet evident.  All we know for sure is that yesterday’s approaches to acquiring, deploying and operating IT are fading fast.

We couldn’t agree more!  But will everything migrate to the cloud?  Most insurance and risk management organizations will continue to struggle with this decision for years to come.  We can only offer options…to host, or not to host…that is the question!