Most insurance technology is aimed at creating administrative and processing efficiencies. It is intended to save money, not make money. It's especially noteworthy then when a new technology product is focused on sales, and in particular, on helping commercial lines producers put business on the books. Sage, a new Internet service provided by Silver Plume, is a rich and easy-to-use information resource that producers can access to understand risks by type of business, the coverages required, where the coverage is available, forms to use and so on.
Silver Plume, of course, created the industry's first consolidated insurance reference library on CD ROM. It's become a standard and is in daily use by thousands of agency and carrier staff across the country. The opportunity to understand and deal with hundreds of publications and scores of publishers and then to work with thousands of agencies and hundreds of carriers has put Silver Plume in the enviable position of thoroughly understanding the informational needs of insurance professionals in support of the insurance process.
For the last thirteen years, Silver Plume has actively added key classification information to the raw material supplied by insurance publishers. Silver Plume's intellectual capital in people, systems, and marked-up content puts it in a unique position to take advantage of the Internet on behalf of the industry. Sage is an evolutionary advance from classic Silver Plume in three important ways: 1) it's available on the Internet; 2) it's focused on a specific area — commercial lines production; and 3) it's incredibly easy to use, even for technology-averse agency sales people.
The Internet
When Silver Plume first appeared in 1989, it was revolutionary in a number of ways. It used a new medium, CD-ROM, to store enormous amounts of volatile insurance reference information. Silver Plume made it possible for agencies to throw away their bureau manuals and with them the odious task of replacing pages in three-ring binders. Everyone could have simultaneous access to the information. The library contained information from multiple and sometimes competing publishers. And it was indexed to make searching through the material for a particular topic straightforward — even across publications and publishers. These concepts seem obvious now though they didn't then.
Interestingly, consolidated electronic libraries with customizable subscription plans remain rare in insurance and other industries. One view today is that consolidated libraries aren't needed. The Internet and cross-site indexing makes them unnecessary. I believe that view is dead wrong. To test this conventional wisdom gem, all you have to do is use any popular search engine. You'll quickly realize that meaningful consolidation can't happen automatically. It requires intermediaries — editors — and the right technology to bring the material together in ways that are truly useful.
CD-ROM is wonderful and a big improvement over paper. But the Internet, at least for some applications, is even better. CD-ROM has limited storage capacity and even with the efficiency of Silver Plume's indexing and compression technology, the desire to add more content can run up against the boundaries of the disc. A library hosted on a Web site can be any size.
Because doing CD-ROM updates more frequently than monthly is impractical for a variety of reasons, Silver Plume content is not completely up-to-date. That doesn't matter for some content, especially when Silver Plume has the changes before they're effective. But everything being equal, it's more desirable to have a library that is re-indexed weekly and then immediately available (without CD-ROM manufacture, shipping, and local installation being required).
By hosting Sage on the Internet, Silver Plume is also able to take advantage of the possibility of linking to other Web sites to allow user access to material not part of the Sage library. So, for instance, Sage indexes not just its own material but also the relevant content of more than 600 insurance wholesalers. This consolidated index therefore allows searches not just across the Sage library but across wholesale market Web sites as well, a significant benefit for producers needing to maximize their time.
Commercial lines production
The Silver Plume library is a general purpose, massive electronic library. It contains information relevant to producers, managers, claims people, CSRs, underwriters, compliance departments, and so on. There is something for everyone. One-size-fits-all can be valuable especially in comparison to the chaos of bits and pieces of information spread out and relatively inaccessible across an organization. On the other hand, one-size-fits-all may not provide the optimum content, structure, features, and accessibility a more focused product could. That's the insight behind Sage and its difference from Silver Plume.
Sage is aimed squarely at commercial lines producers. Everything about it is intended to provide them exactly what they need to understand, sell, and place business. Silver Plume spent a good deal of time understanding the information that producers need. Some was already part of the Silver Plume library. But it became clear that additional information had to be acquired and organized. And, as mentioned above, they realized that the indexing and thus searches needed to go beyond the confines of the library and include, at least, wholesaler Web sites themselves.
Making is really easy to use
As you well know, generic Internet search engines, though extremely powerful, in most cases don't yield the information you're looking for on the first page of the hit list. Sometimes you're willing to look at the hit list page after page hoping to find something relevant. But it's a tedious and too frequently unrewarding process. But what if the search engine were tuned to a particular industry and even to a particular role in the industry? That's what Sage does for P&C insurance and for producers.
Because of its dozen-years experience in insurance libraries, the Silver Plume people have come to understand quite a bit about how people think and search for insurance content. Sage makes use of those insights. In most cases, Sage will deliver exactly what you're looking for — all you have to do is type in a word or two. By using a synonyms table, stemming, concept categorization, key wording, instance counting, structures, and other sometimes esoteric techniques, Sage comes close to guessing what you intend by your search and then ranking the results according to the likelihood of their appropriateness. Silver Plume, through Sage, has put its industry librarian intelligence into the Sage search mechanism — and it pays off.
Full disclosure
I can't pretend to be entirely objective about Silver Plume. After all, as you probably know, I founded Silver Plume with Rick Morgan in 1987. I haven't been involved for several years but I have more than a casual connection with the people and the concepts. It's especially a delight to see a progeny of a sort doing so well — and extending a core idea and business beyond its original and now perhaps somewhat quaint goals. So there you are. I can't help being enthusiastic about what Christina Herman and her team have done. But I do truly believe they've hit the sweet spot.
The Silver Plume people would be happy to give you a guided tour of Sage. Just check the Silver Plume Web site, www.silverplume.com for details.
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