Look at businesses. They are run by people,” observes Piyush Singh, CIO of the $1b market cap RLI Corp., based in Peoria, IL. “As a charter, we look at technologies that will help build solutions for business processes that enhance efficiencies in people. There is no one business platform or large-scale implementation we have focused on.”

Singh has been singularly focused on four principles in adopting or implementing any of the IT platforms within RLI. “No matter how many systems run at the backend, we strive to have a single user interface for the customer—whether a broker, internal employee or a retail agent,” reveals Singh. RLI invested in a portal technology in late 2000 and has deployed it extensively within the enterprise.

Another relatively heavy investment has been in enabling a single point of data entry. “Data entered once needs to flow through the enterprise without human intervention. We had achieved this at the backend, but have worked diligently in establishing this for all front-end facing systems too,” says Singh. This has resulted in enhanced data quality, elimination of redundant data entry and significantly higher employee effectiveness. “The bad part is, if you put in garbage, it flows through as quickly,” laughs Singh.

Single source of information has been a need driven by the fact that the company has a “best-of-breed, buy-and-build” strategy towards application systems. “Data sits in various locations within the enterprise. We used a business intelligence tool to work behind the portal technology, so that people can use the portal as the single point of access for the data,” explains Singh. “I must admit that we have not reached our goal as yet in the enterprise, but we are headed north.”

As with any insurance business, RLI is flooded with documents and Singh is working towards creating a single point of document repository and retrieval. “We have reinvested in a new corporate document management system that will provide universal access to important policy and claims documents—a better set of tools for the claims function that was already imaged, which is then married to the underwriting function, giving the same access and information to both,” says the CIO. “Today we produce and archive the policy documents electronically, and are working on the retrieval system for the enterprise level.” It will help RLI associates in enhancing their productivity.

“eSubmission” is a flagship application that Singh and his team are implementing enterprise-wide, built in-house at RLI. The broker environment typically floats out a request for quote to many firms like RLI via facsimiles and emails. The speed of response is one aspect, but timely risk-evaluation is a more critical component in RLI’s decision-making process. eSubmission was built to shorten the time taken in the decision making process. Once a broker submits a request, the RLI team member runs the national clearance engine on the incoming information. The application then offers a simple front-end to the underwriter to perform a variety of facilities—tracking of submissions, rating, risk modeling, quote management, e-mailing, faxing, binding, policy data entry, policy issuance, and so on. “We have had instances where the broker is still on the phone with our underwriter, and he receives a quote on his fax or e-mail in-box,” chuckles Singh. Finally, once the policy is bound and issued, eSubmission sends the information to be written into the legacy database system—all without human intervention. “The industry standard in providing a policy document for commercial lines is about 60 days. We are working on a 7-day schedule,” observes the CIO.

The new system provided tremendous scalability. With the same staff strength, RLI wrote policies worth $190m compared to $90m it wrote the previous year for one of the lines of business. “While the business is rate driven, volume played a crucial role, in that, with the same staff strength, we managed to respond to more requests much quickly,” explains Singh.

He has been very judicious in investing in his legacy management. “I think legacy is like downtown—there is only so much you can do with changing the crowded space. Whereas, our front-end—the suburbs, if you will—is where most of the current interactions occur. The users really don’t care about what happens at the backend, and we are happy to continue providing the ROI from the front-end,” says Singh. “By automated data interfaces feeding the legacy backbone, we are able to populate data on it and recover whatever responses we need from it, but I have refrained from investing in legacy to make it perform current-day requirements.”

With the diverse packaged applications and in-house developments running, Piyush Singh has managed to establish a sound integration strategy at RLI. “Almost all our applications speak to each other through the hub-and-spoke architecture that we use, and we are experimenting with web services this year,” says the CIO. From the start, Singh has been clear that IT would follow the business strategy closely, and continue to provide it with additional capabilities from new technologies. At every project initiation, Singh and team have been careful to present a list of assumptions, statements of directions and basis for assumptions to the project sponsors. This ensures that “for one, we decided not to adopt any wireless initiative—no commercial insurance business happens on wireless. Secondly, we decided not to be a 24x7x365 model. The business does not need that today. We are now 16x5 (16 hours for five business days), and the strategies have worked well.” observes Singh.

The CIO has also been working in establishing the infrastructure for a paperless office. “Right now, it is a timing and culture issue, and over time, we will be successful,” says Singh. “With the industry average of premium-per-employee being around $600,000, RLI has managed to sustain a rate of around twice the industry average on a per employee basis. In effect, IT has worked together with the changing business needs, and thus in all of us growing up.”