Ovum Gives Birth to Insurance Prophet

By Peter B. Counter
TMCnet Contributing Writer

If only computers could predict the future. How many unfortunate happenings might be avoided if only we could better know the pitfalls and traps that lay before us on the road to achieving our goals? The question is as old as literature. It used to be fantasized about through blind prophet characters, and over millennia, turned technological in science fiction when computers (also blind) started to output future happenings.

We aren’t there yet, and I’m sorry if I implied that we had a computer prophet coming anytime soon. What Ovum (News - Alert), a provider of objective and independent analysis for clients says, is that predictive analytics should be the focus of insurers.

Not so much as a way of knowing the future, but the predictive analytics mentioned in a recent Ovum report would constantly engage insurers in the present so they could make the best decisions. For example, by focusing on creative initiatives that draw from social media and M2M networks, to pool and then analyze vast amounts data, insurers can be better prepared to deal with more chaotic factors and minimize risk.

Looking towards the Internet-of-things as a conceptual source of big data, Ovum says that the resources are available to deal better with impending threats and challenges such as an aging population and weakened economies. M2M, it seems, does harbor this potential. It is a huge source of data, and technologies that can process and visualize it at high speeds are paving the way for predictive analytics. The network keeps growing globally, and is forecasted to only become more useful, especially if the wearable technology everyone’s been talking about catches on, but M2M is just a data source, it won’t tell you what’s going to happen.

Ovum’s solution to this need: a new position in your company. Data scientists, professionals that will be tasked with performing in depth data analysis in conjunction with data miners, who follow hypotheses to scalable conclusions that can be applied to insurable decisions. Ovum claims to already have seen departments for these new positions open up, and it expects them to prove themselves indispensable in ensuring the future runs as smoothly as possible.