One of the benefits of investing in modern, configurable software that is often sought is the ability to move creation and maintenance of systems to the business areas.The premise is that transferring these functions to users will increase quality and reduce costs.In Celent’s discussions with insurers and observations, this is often a goal which is more aspiration than realization.

Our research has begun to quantify the extent to which functions are transferring within various solutions.For example, the graph below details the responses from U.S. insurers using a stand alone rating engine when asked what percentage of work is being performed in their business areas:

Surprisingly, create/change workflow rules are performed more often than change rates. This reflects the expansion of stand alone raters beyond simple arithmetic calculators that was reviewed in the Celent report Future-Proof: Considerations in Choosing Rating Solution Platforms.Not surprisingly, deployment to production is often held in the IT area. For more details, reference the report: US Property/Casualty Rating Systems: ABCD Vendor View, 2009)

We are continuing to collect such data across different software platforms in order to quantify the “promise” of end user maintenance.