Study offers advice on technology decisions. (Technology Notes).The Agents Council of Technology has released a study to help agents and insurance industry leaders evaluate potential technology decisions. The study, "A Vision of the Future for Agency Technology Including the Essential Next Steps for Independent Agents," was released at the recent Independent Insurance Agents of America's InfoXChange in Honolulu. The vision lays out eight major technology trends that will significantly affect how agents do business in the future, including Internet-hosting services, real-time 1. real-time - Describes an application which requires a program to respond to stimuli within some small upper limit of response time (typically milli- or microseconds). Process control at a chemical plant is the classic example. interaction, integration platforms, prospects and customers that do business electronically, singlestep process, collaborative computing computing - computer , ability to compute To perform mathematical operations or general computer processing. For an explanation of "The 3 C's," or how the computer processes data, see computer. and personalized marketing Personalized marketing (also called personalization, and sometimes called one-to-one marketing) is an extreme form of product differentiation. Whereas product differentiation tries to differentiate a product from competing ones, personalization tries to make a unique product and service. The report recommends steps that independent agents can take to position themselves to profit from these emerging technology trends. For example, agency owners should establish a culture that views technology as a strategic opportunity and an integral part of the process of running an agency; the agency should organize itself so there is a chief information person or its equivalent focused on maximizing the benefits of technology; and technology should respond to a defined need in the agency, such as improving a particular business process or workflow The automatic routing of documents to the users responsible for working on them. Workflow is concerned with providing the information required to support each step of the business cycle. . The report can be accessed at www.iiaa.org. |
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