| dc.description.abstract | In 2010, Gartner published a research report describing the market for Policy Administration Systems for the European general insurance market. Many insurance companies are still struggling with inflexible, monolithic and technologically outdated policy administration systems, which are often home-grown and heavily modified. Insurance companies do acknowledge the need to update or replace their systems with modern software solutions that are compliant with the current trends of SOA and software-as-a-service (SaaS) and/or web technologies. For insurance companies, however, it is often unclear what their position is at the moment and how an implementation of a modern IPMS can improve their performance.
This work aims to bridge the gap by providing a maturity model based on process increments and performance indicators. This way, insurance organizations can easily assess their current situation and the desired situation by making use of process descriptions. Performance indicators are used to identify how an organization will benefit from a process increment. Besides assessing the as-is and the to-be situation, a maturity score can be calculated to indicate how maturity increases after implementing one or more process increments.
The findings presented in this work are based on an extensive review of management and scientific literature and functional documentation, and expert interviews from both an insurance software provider and three insurance providers.
The results show that although process increments are not yet (widely) used in the industry, they do show promise for practical application. Insurance providers do make use of process descriptions, but not for the purpose of process improvement, but rather for risk management. The validation interviews show that process descriptions and process increments combined with maturity factors and a maturity model could simplify IPM implementation project, because they provide a relatively fast and easy way to visualize the as-is and the to-be situation. Maturity models are being used more often, but mostly on an organizational level (e.g. CMM-based models) and not on a process level. | |
