The technology conference season for 2012 is officially over. Inthe last four weeks IT leaders and software solution providers—anda few folks like me—spent about eight days together hashing overold problems and speculating about the future.

I started at the IASA conference hoping that when it was all over I could tellyou that I learned four things. I'm not sure I accomplished that;it seems, though, that I was able to reinforce some beliefs, whichis a way of learning as well.

First, I learned that innovation really is a relative term. AsGreat American Insurance CIO Piyush Singh told a crowd at the CIOroundtable, young people don't call advancements in communicationor information “technology” just as previous generations didn'trefer to “radio technology” or “TV technology.”

Insurers are often looked at as laggards in the world ofinnovation, but as SMA partner Karen Furtado told the IT Town Hall, innovation canalso mean taking existing tools and repurposing them. Analyticstools have been around for a while, but now insurers can predicthow things can happen.

There remain a great many unknowns, though. An unidentifiedperson got up at the CIO Roundtable and said, “I really don't knowhow anyone could have predicted that Hurricane Ike (in 2008) couldhave caused $6 billion damage in Ohio.” A point well taken, but nowa part of history, never to be forgotten by actuaries.

Speaking of analysts, there are people concerned about where thefuture IT leaders are going to come from. The IASA awardsscholarships to college students who are majoring in areas thatwill lead to insurance careers. Since IASA has such a strongtechnology base, it would be nice if at least one of the ninescholarship winners this year was majoring in a technology field,but as Furtado—a member of the scholarship committee—pointed outthat as much as the committee wanted to find some worthy ITstudents, it ultimately was unsuccessful.

The solution? There are people in the business world who haveundiscovered skills that can be used to become productive ITleaders and there are ways to discover those hidden talents.Creative people are out there and they can be discovered. Insurersjust need to look for them.

The third thing I learned is that cloud technology is going tobe an eye-opener for small and mid-tier insurance carriers who needto find a way to compete with their larger competitors. The nextbig move could come in the area of policy administration, longthought to be too big or too complicated to be taken to thecloud.

At least one vendor has announced that it's policy suite isin the cloud and several vendors—both at IASA and ACORDLOMA—are getting there.

Imagine getting a URL and starting to write policies in thecloud? It sounds scary—and not as easy as I made it sound—but theinvestment in a cloud-based system can save an insurer millions ofdollars that can be spent to find new business.

Finally, I learned that insurers face difficult choices invirtually every technology decision they make and that the optionsaren't always good ones. Bob Skrzypinski, a consultant on a panel Imoderated, explained that in legacy modernization projects,insurers face three options—good, fast or cheap—and can onlyachieve two of them.

I certainly hope everyone opts for “good” as one of their two.Fast or cheap involve difficult decisions and much depends on anindividual carrier's situation.

Decisions like those are gut-wrenching, but leaders in thisindustry make them every day without knowing for months if theirchoice was the correct one. Sometimes, things are learned the hardway, but the challenge to get things right is inspiring.