“Just Defining a Single Source of Truth Is a Pretty Complex Task in Data Governance”

The Resonance Test 85: Insurance, Data, and Analytics with Harini Wilkinson, Lynn Rivenburgh, and Sirat Chhabra

The reason we don’t think of insurance as an industry on the cutting edge of technological innovation is that, well, it’s not. Not today anyway. Nonetheless, insurance’s brightest thinkers know a change is overdue and are making the transformation to digital a reality. Doing so involves the incorporation of a robust data and analytics program, and that’s precisely what we’re talking about on this episode of The Resonance Test.

Lynn Rivenburgh, VP of Business Consulting at EPAM, joins Harini Wilkinson, SVP & Head of Data & Analytics for Protector Plans, a subsidiary of Brown & Brown Insurance, and Sirat Chhabra, our Director of Insurance Data & Analytics Consulting, for an appraisal of the role data and analytics currently plays (and ideally should play) in the insurance business.

Wilkinson says that more and more insurance companies are investing in “data analytics strategies, in the road map, to really use this to move forward.” She adds that the industry as a whole has been talking for some time about the topic but that the pandemic really escalated the need to act.

“We're seeing that data analytics and becoming an insight-driven organization has been one of the top three priorities for our clients,” says Chhabra.

Chhabra details the saga of becoming a data analytics-driven organization in three stages: data collection, data preparation, and product creation for data analysis.

And, of course, clients are all at different stages of data maturity.

“In my current organization, where we're at the beginning, we've never really used data to drive our business forward,” says Wilkinson. They are at “the beginning stages of really understanding what data is there and how do we structure it in a way that we can use it.”

Our three insurance-minded speakers get into the issues of data governance (a little silo busting, please!), legacy systems, and the nuances of measuring success.

If you’re thinking about insurance, this conversation will certainly carry your interest!

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon