(ETI), one of Jamaica's largest insurers has over 450 thousand policyholders. This equates to about 37 percent of the market share of the competitive insurance industry in which seven companies exist. ETI's oversees assets are in excess of 5.3 billion dollars. The company employs about 850 insurance advisors and 300 office staff, located across an eight-branch network.On June 1, 2020, ETI made a decision to migrate its legacy insurance systems to a new platform. The Herculean task required not only the upgrading of hardware and applications, but also streamlining decade-old business processes and IT practices.

ETI's insurance processes are very tedious and totally paper-based. The entire insurance processstarts with customersmeeting an agent,filling in formsand submitting documents. The agent then submits the forms at branches, from where they are sent by couriers to the Office Services department. The collection schedule introduces delays of two to three days. Office Services logs documents, sorts them, and then sends them for underwriting. Proposals are allocated to underwriting staff; accepted proposals are sent for printing at the Computer Services department and then redistributed. For storage, all original documents are packed and sent to one of four warehouses where, over three days, a total of seven staff would log and store the documents. Paper policies comprising 11 million documents are stored in over 4,000 cartons. Whenever a document needed to be retrieved, it would take about two days to locate and ship it by courier.

In 2019, despite periodic investments to upgrade the HP 9000 server computer systems that hosted the core insurance applications as well as the accounting and management information systems, it still frequently broke down. According to John Ross, CIO at ETI, "The system breakdowns are a real nightmare.Work stops and the staff have to choose either data reconciliation, or backup. The HP 9000 backup system allowed restoration only up to the previous day's backup data. If the daily backup was not completed at the end of the day, the affected day's data would be lost, and costly and tedious reconciliation would be needed to bring the data up-to-date." In one of the hardware crashes, reconciliation took several months to restore the data loss. In all, the HP 9000 system experienced a total of three major hardware failures, resulting in six days of complete downtime.

The insurance programs that were developed in the late 1980s and maintained by ETI's in-house IT team also broke multiple times, halted the systems, and caused temporary interruptions. At the same time, transaction processing for policy underwriting was still a batch process and information was not available to agents and advisors in real-time. As a result, when staff processed a new customer application, they did not know if the applicant was an existing customer, which led to the loss of opportunities for cross-product sales. Commenting on the problems, Ross said "When the agents tried to submit the documents using notebooks, they ran into a lot of problems. HP 9000 was not ideal to connect to such devices.Advisors' telecommuting was also an issue." In addition, departments did not have up-to-date information and had to pass physical documents among each other.

In June 2020, ETI began investigations into the Java based eBaoTech LifeSystem Suite from eBaoTech Corporation. Ross said "It has everything we are looking for - a customer-centric design, seamless integration with barcode technology, and a product definition module that supports new products and changes in business processes." If signed off, implementation work would have started in September 2020. By May 2021, all the customization, data migration, and training were expected to be completed. ETI also decided to replace its entire IT infrastructure with a more robust, scalable architecture. With the new system all documents would be scanned and stored on storage devices that enabled strict compliance with statutory requirements. Ross earmarks that "By adopting eBao, ETI would need only 180 office staff and 750 insurance advisors" who would access the system anytime, anywhere.

According to Ross, "We hope to have a singular view of every customer - across products and channels and even better life and general insurance business lines. This would allow us opportunities to cross-sell and improve customer service. In addition, achieving straight through processing workflow capabilities, there should be about 50 percent savings on both time and cost needed to process policies."On April 1, 2022, Expert Thinking Insurance finally signed off the investigations and made a decision to acquire the Java based eBaoTech LifeSystem.Is this a case where timing is a point of concern? Iata Bayo, ETI's CEO comments "At this time, we can get a fantastic deal: the best system for a much reduced cost."

Questions

1. State whether Expert Thinking Insurance should continue to pursue the current information system solution. Justify your answer. Describe any additional or alternative solutions that should be considered.

b. Select an information system solution previously or currently being pursued by Expert Thinking Insurance or suggested as an additional or alternative solution and state the type(s) of information system, two possible features, and the business process(es) the solution will support or may affect.