The SEMCI Clock: How Long Will It Continue ToRun? Have you ever noticed that some things just seem togo on and on without ceasing? Staples like Friday the13^th sequels, The Tonight Show, TheRolling Stones, James Bond movies and philandering politicians justrefuse to go awayfor better or worse.

Likewise, in the insurance world, it seems the agency communityhas been talking about single-entry, multiple-company interface(SEMCI) forever, with no foreseeable end in sight.

I got to wondering the other day just how long we havebeen talking about the elusive state of being able to enter dataonce and have a variety of carriers understand and respond to it,without having to re-key for each insurers proprietary systems.

A consultation with some of the industrys leading voicesrevealed that SEMCIoften dubbed the Holy Grail of insurancehas beena topic of conversation since at least the early 1980sright aroundthe time PCs started showing up on consumers desks.

Of course, thats not as long as most of our examples above havebeen around, but according to National UnderwriterPublisher and Editor-in-Chief Sam Friedman, SEMCI has been on theminds of agents and others since at least September 1981. Thatsclose to 22 years.

Maybe you can remember talking about SEMCI prior to that date,but most of our experts seem to think that SEMCI became an issue atabout that time.

Over the years since then, the industry has endured muchdiscussion and seen precious little progress on the SEMCI issue. Anumber of software vendors have announced a partial or fullsolution (and some of them may have been right), but adoption bythe industry has not followed.

When I came into the insurance industry from the technologysector five years ago, I said that the technology to achieve SEMCIalready existed. That didnt change the fact, however, that no onewas producing it, buying it or implementing it.

The struggle, it seems, is not about technology, but about howmuch information carriers want to share with independent agents.Understandably, insurers dont want to have their products reducedto commodity statuswhere buyers look at a spreadsheet of quotesfrom carriers and make a pick based on price alone.

On the other hand, price isnt the only factor that affects aconsumers choice, so maybe insurers need to be more effective atmarketing those other factors.

In any case, weve decided to mark the start of the SEMCI clocksseemingly interminable ticking at September 1981 (the nearest wecould get to an exact date), and to chronicle its advance inAgency Technology on the Cutting Edge as the months (andyears?) go by.

Will the clock finally stop ticking? Only when single-entry iscommon practice and that seems a long way off.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, May 12, 2003.Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serialpublication. All rights reserved. Copyright in this article as anindependent work may be held by the author.