Introduction
TUFS:
The Technical underwriting financial system (TUFS) was the first largest Information Technology (IT) project ever implemented by Northern Insurance. Like any other IT project, TUFS also requires value assessment. This assessment helps the business people to identify the risks and benefits related to the project. TUFS was mainly designed to increase the efficiency of underwriting processes and to provide strategic e-business capabilities. But the e-business feature was not used by the company from the past two years (Smith & McKeen, 2005).
The anticipated benefits represent expectations, which in this case do not appear to have been clearly defined by IT or their business counterparts. At this point it may be of more interest to ask how the project fits into the company strategy. One important reason for this, is that benefits mentioned by the project will be tactical. In our case, improved efficiency and e-business may be good business tactics, but without clear strategy, it is difficult to predict how these features would give advantage to the company.
Risks at Northern Insurance
Martin Drysdale, CIO of National Insurance and his team completed the project in on time and on budget . At that time everyone thought TUFS would bring efficiency to underwriting process and new opportunities for top-line growth. But, from the time it was installed on to the systems, the maximum IT budget and resources were used to fix the underwriting errors that kept appearing. Almost $4 million was spent on TUFS after implementation. This is because some of the functionalities were altered due to the tight deadlines and lack of communication between the technicians and underwriters (Smith & McKeen, 2005).
While develop...
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...must be taken into consideration while designing it. If not the project may not give complete results as expected. In case of TUFS, some of these features were lagging. Those can be now modified by taking some measures as mentioned above, though it may not give complete results but it can now produce similar results as expected.
References
Colin Beveridge: Guidelines for IT management- Aligning IT with Business Strategy, Guideline number 273.
James D. McKeen and Heather Smith (2012): IT Strategy-Issues and Practices, second Edition.
Lionel Macedo (2009): The Role of Underwriters in Insurance, primer series on insurance, issue 8, September, 2009.
Mahdi Bahrami, Mazaher Ghorbani, S. Mohammad Arabzad (2012): Information Technology as an Improvement Tool for Customer Relationship Management, Procedia- Social and Behavioral Sciences 41(2012) 59-64.
Underwriting is the assessment of risk that a potential customer may have, this allows the company to offer the customer a certain amount of coverage. This is something critical for
The initiation phase of a project is not complete without a clearly defined goal and realistic, measurable objectives that describe the business benefits which are expected to be delivered upon completion of a project (Laureate Educatio...
The two main issues in this case are the project analysis and financial forecasting. The project should be analyzed before doing the forecasting, because any recommendations on the project will affect financial forecasting for the next two years.
...easuring the impact of a particular marketing project can help make better marketing decisions in the future. Generally one or two are chosen as a focus. With the Allstate Insurance case, the most important ones to follow would probably be awareness and market share. Making people aware of the product that is offered was a goal of the marketing project, but gaining a bigger market share was an even bigger focus.
The project will bring several changes to the company; it will first expand the current physical IT environment. It will provide the ability to increase the storage capacity of the current storage requirement and expected growth of data, while establishing a new data warehouse and business analytics applications and user interfaces. The project will also improve security by establishing security policies and it will leverage newer cloud based technology to provide a highly redundant, flexible and scalable IT environment while also allowing the ability to establish a low cost disaster recovery site.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): Risk Management Guide for Information Technology Systems. Special Publication 800-30, 2002.
Analysis Introduction This project belongs in the engineering-efficiency category; therefore, it has to fit at least 3 of 4 performance hurdles, which are 1. Impact on EPS; 2.Payback; 3.Discounted cash flow and 4. Internal rate of return. In this article, some of those involved explained and described their opinions; however, professional knowledge may have been lacking.
Business Insurance News, Analysis & Articles. Web. The Web. The Web.
Ans: Jean has failed to consider a fundamental rule of “business as usual”. The manager level employees of all departments are cautious about status quo being maintained. In addition to this, Jean has also failed to account the need for cross functional team. The repercussions of which will be in the form of increased pressure on him in making sure users of the software package implemented have right kind of expertise and qualifications to use.
Adding new features during development is not allowed, thereby helping in finalizing delivery date. Requirements and are well defined.
Others feel that ABC would be more widespread in industry if it were marketed better by the cost accounting profession itself [1]. As the dust has settled, ABC has turned out to be less a revolutionary technique than a useful refinement to proven systems. The costs of products and services must be accurate, or management can be misled. Decisions... ...
...implementation. The system is still in heavy research to bring these costs down and also to make improvements on the system. Although the full scale commercial size systems are not practical at this time, small scale experimental plant systems are being for further research. OTEC is expected to make an impact on the future.
Business today is inextricably intertwined with technology, from the smallest home office, to a multinational corporation with multiple monolithic legacy application. It is impossible to be in business today without confronting the issues of technology. The way we do business today is different than 30 years ago. Technology has evolved around the areas of telecommunication, travel, stock market, shipping even around our daily lives. E-commerce a system by which people can buy, sell and deal without even seeing the person on the other side has taken a front seat in improving the economy of countries around the world. Technology today has made it possible for monetary institutions to help locate the customers resources and help solve their problems at any given time through online banking. The Internet, a boon to all business, is playing a part of a catalyst; it links millions of customers to its suppliers and vice versa due to this, manufactures are able to cut the role of middlemen and are able to deal with the customers, giving them the ability for direct input from the customers about their choices and views of their product. The busi...
Companies are beginning to move their CRM application out of data centers and onto the cloud making CRM less expensive and easier to expand. (Shein, 2009) Technology advances are also allowing companies to begin to take better advantage of big data, combing internal data with social media and mobile to deliver more business value. (Goodwin, 2013) In the future, more devices will be connected to the Internet. Cars, buildings, bodies and many other things will be connected through sensors and it is expected that this increase in information will continue to drive the changes in CRM and how it is used to support sales, marketing and customer service. (Sartain,
Richard, J. E., Thirkell, P. C., & Huff, S. L. (2007). An Examination of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Technology Adoption and its Impact on Business-to-Business Customer Relationships. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 18(8), 927-945. doi:10.1080/14783360701350961