Business Insurance RMIS Article

"Tools Permit Internet Document Collaboration"

November 4, 2002

By Robert Ceniceros

NEW YORK -- In the past, Steve A. Stich wasn't much impressed by the computer technology options available for risk managers.

But Mr. Stich, chief risk officer for Oshkosh Truck Corp., recently discovered Internet technology that excites him.

Mr. Stich made his discovery while attempting to merge the Oshkosh, Wis.-based company's domestic insurance program with insurance policies held by a recently acquired European company.

It looked like it was going to be an arduous task, Mr. Stich said; the acquired company had itself just acquired units in other European countries, and those units had purchased a variety of policies issued by a variety of insurers.

But what Mr. Stich found to help him was collaborative document management technology developed by New York and London-based Riskclick Inc. Riskclick's product is a shared software suite that allows multiple parties-such as brokers, insurers, consultants and risk managers-to work on the same spreadsheets or word processing documents even though the parties' computer hardware is not integrated.

Collaborative technology made it easy for Mr. Stich to compare and integrate the insurance policies for manufacturing and distribution business units spread over 11 European countries. It let him obtain policy summaries, risk assessments and other documents from the individual independent brokers in each country-all while rushing to meet the demands of a corporate integration deadline.

"What was really exciting is they were able to make it all visible to us instantaneously,'' Mr. Stich said. "All I have to do is get into the Internet and give passwords, and I have access to everything everyone else has.''

Riskclick also develops an audit trail by tracking and noting any time one of the parties reads or changes any of the documents.

The building of audit trails places greater structure around Internet interactions, said Brian Warren, risk manager at Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash. And structure helps prevent misunderstandings among parties accessing documents via the Internet, Mr. Warren said.

Recording each interaction, for example, could help clearly establish when a participant opted to offer or accept a contract document, Mr. Warren said. That makes it harder to confuse or dispute the participants' intentions.

The technology also has a notification system that alerts each designated party when a document is read, filed or changed. "It's kind of like e-mail on steroids,'' Mr. Warren said.

Collaborative technology-available from Riskclick and several other companies-is an "evolutionary step'' toward conducting transactions such as insurance purchasing over the Internet, Mr. Warren said.

Riskclick provides only the means to collaborate over the Internet, said Tim Wright, Riskclick chairman and chief executive officer. It does not advocate the specific types of transactions customers engage in.

GRX Technologies of Providence, R.I., is one of the other companies that provides the commercial insurance industry with such collaborative tools, said Matthew Flanagan, GRX's chief marketing officer.

GRX uses collaborative technology to focus on speeding the submission of policies for underwriting, Mr. Flanagan said. But GRX also provides technology that allows risk managers to easily integrate data from their computers into brokers' and underwriters' computer systems.

A risk manager can, for example, create an exposure report from his company's database and move it directly into an insurer's system, regardless of differences in the two parties' computer technology, Mr. Flanagan explained.

Several risk management technology observers note that while collaboration products and integration services have been available for about two years, they still aren't in wide use by risk managers. These observers say that while collaboration products, which are also known as "transaction platforms,'' have been used to settle claims and to purchase coverage in a few instances, their use for buying coverage remains limited.

"If we were to rely on that segment of the marketplace to drive our income, we would be cooling our heels for some time to come,'' said David Bradford, executive vp, for Advisen, a New York-based online provider of information services for the commercial insurance industry. "It just has not taken off as a significant part of the transaction market at this point in time.''

Mr. Stich found his way to collaborative technology when he turned to the Worldwide Broker Network, an international network of brokers and agents, to help him assess the risks and policies of the European company Oshkosh acquired. Riskclick technology and the WBN, with its string of brokers across Europe, accomplished the job, he said.

Mr. Stich said he foresees greater use of collaborative technology at his company. He wants to develop a system to allocate insurance-related costs to each Oshkosh business unit, and he wants Oshkosh's insurers to invoice those units, while he receives notification of the invoices for his approval before the business unit pays the bill.

Though Mr. Stich said he finds his new Internet capabilities "pretty exciting,'' he wasn't always enthusiastic about the computer technology available for risk managers. He had looked at risk management information systems, for example, and found, he said, that they didn't provide "enough bang for the buck.'' They were too narrowly focused on claims management and not flexible enough, Mr. Stich said.

RMIS products originally derived from insurer claims processing systems, Microsoft's Mr. Warren said. Consequently, while many RMIS are well suited for an array of claims-related processes, "when you start looking at your whole business process and what you are responsible for as a risk manager, that is only a piece of what you need to do,'' he said. "It's far from the whole thing.''

But a distinction should be made between claim information systems and Internet-based risk management information systems, said Paul Bildsoe, vp business development for Atlanta-based Risk Laboratories L.L.C.

By his definition, Mr. Bildsoe said, a true RMIS integrates a greater array of risk-related information into a single database. RiskLabs' products, for example, track both claims and exposure data, as well as information about how many coverage dollars remain untapped under specific policies.

Because RMIS tools assist in collecting data and formatting reports, they are ideal for feeding information to the new online systems such as those provided by GRX and Riskclick, Mr. Bildsoe said.