User-Led Implementation

Every failed insurance technology implementation has a moment early in the process where the vendor's sales demo became the de facto requirements document.

The demo is designed to impress. It features the best workflows, the cleanest data, and the most compelling use cases. It is not designed to surface the edge cases, workarounds, and exceptions that make up thirty percent of your actual day-to-day operations. Those only emerge when the people doing the work are asked to describe it in detail before requirements are finalized.

The implementations that land well start with a different discipline: structured sessions with the actual end users -- underwriters, claims adjusters, agents, billing staff -- who walk through their real workflows, not the idealized versions. That process is slower and less exciting than a vendor roadshow. It produces requirements documents that survive contact with reality.

The best technology investments are shaped by the people who will use them every day. Everything else is a guess that the vendor's demo happened to confirm.