‘What’s in the bag?’
Ask any golfer this question and it could turn into a many hour conversation. These days with so many different types of golf clubs on the market and for players of different skill levels, it’s tough to understand which clubs are right for you. It’s exactly the same when navigating the world of insurtechs and new technologies when choosing what is right for your insurance organization.
You need to be using the best-of-breed technology and equipment that suits you. Back in the day, folks used to buy a set of golf clubs and most of them belonged to just one brand, and they kept those clubs for years and years. We’ve come a long way since then and now new golf club and analytics technologies can better understand your swing speeds, types of swing, strength and then best recommend the golf clubs that suit the different parts of your game: putter, wedges, irons, hybrids, fairway woods, driver. Moreover, with further competition amongst the brands, each manufacturer has become the best in each of different categories of clubs for different skill levels e.g. Mizuno is making great irons for players of mediocre skill.
Choose vendors wisely
You should be taking this mindset when it comes to choosing software vendors i.e. understand the level of your organization, and which types technologies best suit your different product lines because they could be a totally different set of needs (just like in golf where you have your short game and your long game). Think about it, even the tour pros, though they may be sponsored by one brand, will use clubs of different brands if they are the best for them. Being sponsored by one brand is great but they don’t have your best interest at heart most of the time — it’s a well-known fact that while Tiger Woods was being sponsored by Nike, he was using Mizuno clubs with the Nike logo stuck on top because the club technology had not caught up yet.
Modernising legacy technology
You might be thinking ‘But I’ve invested in this core software that’s become legacy’ and now upgrading or switching is harder than ever. I’ve got great news, because that’s where we come in, PolicyDock provides you a platform for you to try, use and change different technologies so you can see how they run in a real world environment and not get tied to them before you commit, even better, it’s still backward compatible with your old core software. Just like a golfer who’s built up bad swing habits due to the clubs becoming out of date, we understand that change doesn’t happen all at once and getting used to the new technologies happens over time. For each of your product lines, you can now choose from best-of-breed technologies and integrate them easily, e.g. for a high transaction volume product, you may need enhanced analytics packages to track and monitor user buying patterns, but for an infrequent high premium specialized product, you will need to integrate 3rd party data sources to ease the customer experience.
Don’t be a slave to technology, let the technology work for you — be more in control. Times have changed since being stuck on mainframes that required expensive on-premise support. The great thing these days is, with the web services and cloud architecture, you can now try most technologies before you buy, they can be deployed remotely and you’re not tied into long hefty contracts, heck, some golf stores also allow you to try the latest golf clubs for 30 days or your money back. So pick multiple golf clubs, try them all before you buy, and when the new line of clubs come out next year, you don’t have to worry that you’re stuck on the previous technologies with a playing disadvantage — just switch them out.
So, don’t be a chump, don’t get stuck on one vendor and the next time I ask you “What’s in your technology stack?” — I hope it’s not a one word answer.