Mastering the Electronic Content Connection
Going paperless is a key element of going green, and that’s at the core of ImageRight’s business as it provides document and content management solutions for insurance operations
of all sizes.
BEST’S REVIEW: Electronic content management is a big initiative. What’s that all about?
PHIL HARGROVE: Electronic content management refers to a suite of software applications that manages all forms of electronic content on a common platform. We’ve evolved from this concept of document management that was focused on simply converting paper into some digital form to now include everything that’s in digital content. It could be audio files, video files, graphics or pictures. It could be e-mail, PDFs, Word or Excel files. Not only does it manage storing those; it’s the ability to view them, edit them and manage them in their native format.
BR: What is the level of adoption of electronic content management among insurers and insurance agents?
HARGROVE: While this is still very much a paper intensive industry, more and more transactions are being handled in some form of electronic format. It’s not so much a matter of gaining acceptance as it is meeting the demand to be able to handle greater and greater forms of electronic content and manage those for the companies.
BR: ImageRight focuses entirely on the insurance industry. What are the implications of that?
HARGROVE: Focusing on insurance allows us to fully understand the needs of our customers and deliver products and services that provide the specific solutions to the problems that they face every day. That means we can quickly implement our system because we don’t have to spend a lot of consulting-time and prep-time trying to understand what they do—we know what they do. The users of our systems have an intuitive understanding of what they’re doing in the system, everything is geared toward the insurance industry so that everything is put into the terms of insurance professionals. We really only see an upside to this, and especially since now we’ve become part of Vertafore, which also shares our focus within the insurance industry.
BR: What other trends are you seeing?
HARGROVE: One of the biggest is integrating straight through processing. This goes beyond just what goes on inside our customers’ four walls to really being able to talk to all your business partners in the industry. That ability to electronically share and communicate along the insurance value team is something that’s become very important. We’re also seeing a lot of merger and acquisition activity going on both within the vendors and the company space within the industry. When that happens, typically there is an opportunity to re-evaluate current platforms, as they try to figure out how they’re going to combine all these operations. This also brings an opportunity for vendors such as us to be looked at as someone who can deliver new solutions that are more fully integrated with the things that they’re doing. Also, looking at ways to better integrate applications, whether it’s things like Web services or just the easy integration to nonproprietary formats is something that companies need to do in order to reduce their costs and make these things really pay off.
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