Unfortunately, proprietary winds have blown away most attempts at a true once and done objective. Companies have used the power and ease of the Internet to move their proprietary terminals that still dot agent offices to proprietary Web forms that agents must complete online and then again on their agency management system. It is more convenient for a company to receive an application in a form that is familiar to the underwriter. Companies have and will always need some supplementary information. Individuality, automation wars and the industry's reluctance to let go of paper add cost to an already intensely bureaucratic system.
Cost comes in two forms.
First, because work must be duplicated, more staff is needed. Commissioned agents cannot charge more for their services so their increased costs come directly from profit. Second, errors inevitably occur when the same work is done more than once. The potential for omissions is magnified when information must be transferred from a familiar application to one that is not so familiar. Altman explains that ITM has built a piece of Internet-based middleware using Lotus Domino Servers which resides at an ITM facility.