Information technology concepts and applications

¶ … organization's database structure and a review of the 1992 article in the February Direct Marketing Journal by Jay Jaffe called "Small Changes Mean Big Bucks For Insurance Marketers." The paper includes details on some of the database applications we used while I was employed in the insurance industry. Database technology has greatly sped up the industry's ability to services customers and with the new online capabilities provides customer quotes almost instantly. Couple that with the speed and accuracy of the quotes and one can see the benefits provided by the store and retrieve capabilities of databases.

Since the article was from way back in 1992, the technology that we use today could probably not even have be imagined back then. Although it was only 12 years, technological advances in both software and hardware have come a long way since then. The article by Jaffe was about how some a small adjustment by a company's Information Technology department along with a dedicated marketing effort can lead to big financial returns. "The effectiveness of a database insurance marketing program is best measured in terms of a comparison between expenses needed to mount a marketing campaign and the marketing allowance generated by the campaign." (Jaffe, 1992) In other words, the article was more or less an explanation of how a database marketing campaign can be used to generate more income for a company.

This article was not really as up-to-date as one might hope because as mentioned, the changes in technology have been dramatic. But the changes in the industry have been equally dramatic. The concept of a database marketing campaign even seems outdated in our highly global and technologically advanced society. I know they are done, but we rely more heavily on the Internet so marketing campaigns may still use databases but they would be databases on some other network and thus just accessed through the net.

The databases my organization used were called The Agency Manager or TAM and they are made by Applied Systems. Applied Systems has been an insurance industry giant for some time because they provide database and other industry software to well over half of the biggest insurance brokers in North America. The majority of the companies using the TAM database system have some of the software on their own servers and the majority is accessed through the internet TAM system. We had just started moving to online system where we logged directly on to the Internet site to request information as needed and by simply hitting the enter key we could get an almost instantaneous response. Ironically, the company also used an external quoting process from Travelers from St. Paul, Minnesota. They also utilize the Applied System database technologies including online TAM. Because of the online remote access the system could allow us to work from anywhere 24/7 and provide instant quotes.