New York, NY, USA
January 3, 2008Document
Automation Solution
Vendors for Insurers 2007
Report Published by Celent
As the document automation space has matured,
there has been a convergence of functionality and features offered by
vendors. This is a positive development for clients, but can make the
selection process difficult. Insurers will need to answer some questions
about their usage of a document automation solution before making a vendor
choice.
Document automation is the authoring or automatic
generation of a document to communicate with external parties. Because the
majority of incoming and outgoing communication in most stages of the
insurance life cycle is still paper-based, simplifying document generation
through automation solutions is a high priority for CIOs. In a new report,
Document Automation Solution Vendors for Insurers 2007, Celent
examines 11 document automation vendors and solutions.
Recent years have seen a substantial amount of
convergence among document automation solutions. Nearly all vendors now
offer a WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") interface for
template design, as well as both ad-hoc and batch capability. At an even
more detailed level, most vendors build templates from document
components, allowing a content author to create text blocks, rules, and
logic once and then reuse it across multiple templates.
As service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become a
landmark in most insurers' technology road maps, all the profiled document
automation vendors have made a major commitment to SOA, either building
solutions from the ground up using Java and/or .NET or providing web
service wrappers.
Source: Celent
*Skywire Software includes Documaker and IStream.
"Vendors are providing solutions that will
allow customers to rethink their entire document production strategy,
giving new kinds of users access to the process and extending the life
cycle of an electronic document beyond printing," says Jeff
Goldberg, Celent senior analyst and co-author of the report.
"Future developments in the space will continue to push the
boundaries of the concept of a document," he adds.
The report features Celent's ABCD Vendor View, which
is a standard representation of a vendor marketplace designed to show the
relative positions of each vendor in four categories: Advanced technology,
Breadth of functionality, Customer base, and Depth of client services.
Unlike a simple "four-quadrant" map, solutions in the upper
right are not necessarily the best solutions-there is no one
"best" for all cases. Insurers should consider which factors in
breadth, technology, experience, and client service are most important to
them and use the profiles and comparative tables in this report to
generate their own shortlists. Only fully profiled vendors are included in
the ABCD Vendor View.
The 59-page report contains eleven in-depth
profiles, five figures, and seven tables. A table
of contents is available online.
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