Industry Innovation: Insurance

Today's insurance CIOs are shifting their focus away from cost reduction to speed, flexibility, and innovation. As insurance buyers' habits change from face-to-face interactions with agents to Web-based and mobile virtual experiences, CIOs are looking to develop strategies to ensure that IT's capabilities keep pace with — and even anticipate — business needs. While strong interest in virtualization continues, insurance CIOs are evaluating alternatives for applications and infrastructure in the cloud and are supporting sales and marketing activity using social media. Given the installed base of legacy systems and insurers' necessary conservatism, CIOs need to move cautiously but take concrete steps to adopt technologies that can significantly boost productivity and agility. They should identify the costs and benefits of these innovations while developing plans to protect their assets from security threats and other problems.