Since 2010, Insurance-Canada.ca has presented awards for the innovative use of technology in the Canadian P&C industry. We’ve made some adjustments over the years. This year we’ve taken the next step and put one of the awards in your — the people’s — hands. It will be interesting to see the results.
What’s the purpose of these awards, anyway?
We set up the ICTAs (Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Awards) in 2010 to “celebrate organizations in the Canadian Property and Casualty Insurance industry whose implementation and use of technology shows a significant impact on a process or group of processes used in the sale, processing and servicing of insurance in Canada.”
In other words, it is not the technology that wins, but the effective use of technology to improve the business.
The first insurer award winners were:
- York Fire and Casualty, who implemented real time endorsements using technology from iter8 (now part of Quindell).
- Pembridge Insurance, who used Brovada technology for broker access
- Sun Life Financial, for enterprise data management, using IBM technology, and
- State Farm for a mobile application
Let’s see, broker real-time access, data privacy controls, mobile applications. Looking back 6 years, these have had significant impact
Since then, we have celebrate over 50 organizations – insurers, brokers, service providers, and technology providers. And raised a toast to the awardees and to the industry that benefits from the pioneers.
Processes can be improved … even awards processes
For the first two years, it was the Insurance-Canada.ca staff that selected the winners. In 2012, we recruited a jury comprised of leaders in the insurer, broker, and analyst sectors to make the decisions.
At the outset, we were a little skeptical that these very busy people would have the time tor review all of the applications and go through the negotiation process. We tried to ‘help’ by providing summaries and making recommendations.
Bad idea. We’ve learned to stay out of the way when these folks get together.
All of the jurors then and since have been very active participants in evaluating, arguing for, and, ultimately, selecting the best of the nominees. They deserve, and have, our deepest gratitude.
And next …
This year, we have added one more twist: The Peoples’ Choice ICTAs (PICTAs). We had an exceptional group of 27 nominees this year. In addition to the work of the jury (now completed, with the results being held for release at the 2015 Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Conference), we have set up an information and polling site for you to review nominations and vote for the candidate of your choice.
Think of it as crowd-sourcing an award. If you have not done so, have a look at the nominees and exercise your franchise.
This will be open until Close of Business, March 5, 2015. At that point, the miracles of technology will supply us with an overall winner and two runners up.
All of this will be revealed …
.. during the awards ceremony at the end of the first day of the 2015 Insurance-Canada.ca Technology Conference – March 9, 2015, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
While we hope you’ll join us for all of the conference, if you are not able, you can stop by to hear our Keynote presentation, from Gartner’s Kimberly Harris-Ferante, attend the Awards Ceremony, and have a drink with the the jurours, the winners, and our sponsors at the Awards reception. Information and registration is available here.
What do you think…
Will your vote match that of the jury? Will the overall results show different trends from those of the jurors?
Will you do better than your co-workers in predicting the results? (Not that we’re encouraging side bets. Just saying.)
It will be interesting to see.
