Many companies and some agencies use Lotus Notes, the brainchild of Ray Ozzie, inventor of a software category called groupware. Groupware allows employees to easily share information beyond the somewhat clumsy and limited capabilities of e-mail.
Though Lotus Notes may work well within an organization, it is not well suited to the kinds of intermittent and temporary projects that cross organizational boundaries, involving people from several different companies.
Software entrepreneurs have been busy over the last few years creating Internet-based services that allow groups of people to collaborate on projects - even if they belong to different organizations. There have even been some attempts to do this in the insurance world. But ASP-based groupware can have some shortcomings. The functionality offered may be too generic and vague or too specific and inflexible. And use of the groupware requires being connected to the Internet, a sometimes inconvenient or impossible condition.
After IBM bought Lotus, Ray Ozzie left. He's now invented what may prove to be a successor to Lotus Notes. At the least, it answers a need that Notes can't - peer-to-peer groupware. Groove is a platform geographically and institutionally diverse people can use to collaborate through the Internet on temporary or continuing projects. Because it is peer-to-peer, no central server is required. All the information is stored identically on each project participant's PC. A participant can work off-line but whenever more than one of the project's PC is logged onto the Internet at the same time, the project data in the computers are synchronized to be identical.
Ozzie got his ideas for Groove from watching his kids play interactive games and use instant messaging on the Internet. He imagined a product like Notes that any group of people could use anytime to collaborate, and that wouldn't require the aid of an IT department or vendor to set up. They could do it themselves on their own PCs.
Groove is a platform that contains basic collaborative functionality like calendars and contacts. But it's real strength lies in its extensibility. Groove can be added to, creating special purpose collaborative environments. That's why it may prove very interesting to the insurance industry.
The commercial lines sales problem solved?
Sales of commercial lines policies (beyond small commercial) often require a collaborative effort between prospect, producer, and one or more underwriters. The process may move in fits and starts, often looping back on itself with requests for more information and negotiation. Today, the process is supported by a hodge-podge of telephone, FAX, e-mail, and paper mail, with pre-designed forms, free-form text, Excel files, and so on. It's necessarily a complex process, but perhaps unnecessarily clumsy.
Imagine, if you will, the application of Groove or something like it to support the commercial lines sales process. An agency would provide a special Groove download area on its Web site. The prospect would download Groove and the producer would work through the risk analysis and other initial sales steps with the pros-pect using Groove. When appropriate, company underwriters would download Groove and begin to participate in the process. The producer would manage the environment so participants saw only what was relevant to them.
Once the collaborative environment was established with the prospect (who then became a customer), agency service functions could be facilitated, as well as audit and claim processes.
Heretofore, technology has been applied to the insurance environment to create self-sufficient nodes that then have to figure out how to communicate with one another to complete a transaction. Groove, and peer-to-peer technology, make it possible to focus on the transaction rather than the entity. It may well be that makes more sense in the commercial insurance world.
Entrepreneurs wanted
I suspect that Groove - and advancements rumored to be part of Windows in the future - provide enormous potential for the insurance industry to fit technology to the real needs of the insurance process, rather than distorting the process around the limitations of technology, which is what has happened in the past.
Someone has a wonderful opportunity to extend Groove to insurance specific collaboration and create a useful and innovative business in the process. Who's up for it?
Take a look
If you want to take a look at Groove yourself, even set up a collaborative environment with others internal or external to your organization, you can download a preview version of Groove for free (for now at least). Go to www.groove.net and look for the preview version download area. The site includes a great deal of background information, including an on-line discussion area where some of your questions may have already been asked and answered.
Even if you don't want to take the time to look at Groove, do spend a little time thinking about the potential applicability of the peer-to-peer computing model to parts of the insurance process. My guess is that you'll see a number of different applications that solve real problems that are today poorly handled or even caused by the current independent node or central server based computing paradigms. Then maybe you can influence your vendor or user group to look into peer-to-peer solutions.
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