Search Your Need

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Business Analyst In Insurance Domain

The right balance of information & technical knowhow is necessary for a Business Analyst to successfully complete his job in any sector. This dictum applies to the Insurance sector as well.

A Business Analyst ought to be well versed with the information that is necessary for any Insurance professional to work in the Insurance domain. Since they has to analyze the processes & then help in the development of essential application for the projects in the Insurance sector, they needs to have both – the information necessary of an Insurance professional & the technical knowledge necessary for the establishment of application designed for this sector.

Insurance as is known is usually divided in to four major divisions: Life Insurance (dealing with safeguarding life & the risk of mortality & critical illnesses), General Insurance (dealing with the risk of destroy to immovable property, motor, cargo, marine, household, & fire insurance), medical insurance (dealing with risk of disease & disease, & thus covers reimbursements, medical claims, operation of panel doctors, cashless hospitalization, co payment etc.) The level of knowledge & range necessary is different in each stream & hence a Business Analyst has to have a definite demonstrable understanding of the workings of the particular streams in the sector & also desirably, adequate level of experience in the sector.


Functional Knowledge of Insurance applications is also essential, like new business, channel management, policyowner servicing, claims management, underwriting, reinsurance & finance. Along with knowledge of the business processes of the particular client company, a brief & thorough understanding of the requirements given by the regulatory authority of the Insurance industry is also mandatory. The terminology is varied for the Insurance sector, with changes even within the sector, for the different streams of the sector. Knowledge of these unique terminologies will help the Business Analyst to understand the client who is the finish user’s expectations & they will be able to draft them better in to requirements effectively.


Four times functional requirements are known, the technical knowhow is also essential for any lovely Business Analyst to communicate to his application developer’s team about the client user’s expectations from the project. The Business Analyst ought to be aware of the basic MS- Office tools like Microsoft Word, Ms PowerPoint, MS Excel, MS Visio, MS Access, & MS Project). These help in collating information & presenting it in proper format. Then knowledge of relational databases is also important for understanding the technicalities of Querying & Support. Basic programming languages that are used by application developers ought to even be known to the Business Analyst so that they can understand the developer’s issues or point of view. These programming languages could be ASP, Dot Net, JAVA, J2EE, XNL, HTML etc.


In addition to these, knowledge & experience in insurance business applications, content management systems, portals, information warehousing tools can give any Business Analyst that additional edge over others standing next to him.

Thus, it’s clear that a Business Analyst in the Insurance domain needs to know both sides of the coin – the knowledge of insurance business processes & the relevant Insurance application packages.

No comments:

Post a Comment