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Saturday, June 26, 2010

Business Analyst In Insurance Domain

The right balance of information and 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 and 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 and the technical knowledge necessary for the establishment of application designed for this sector.

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


Functional Knowledge of Insurance applications is also essential, like new business, channel management, owner servicing, claims management, underwriting, reinsurance and finance. Along with knowledge of the business processes of the particular client company, a brief and 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 and they will be able to draft them better in to requirements effectively.


Six times functional requirements are known, the technical knowhow is also essential for any nice 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, and MS Project). These help in collating information and presenting it in proper format. Then knowledge of relational databases is also important for understanding the technicalities of Querying and 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 and 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 and the relevant Insurance application packages.

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