Information systems in the insurance industry are increasingly used to shape customer interaction and complement the traditional insurance services. The requirements of customer-centric information systems (CC IS), particularly regarding agility, differ significantly from the backend systems, which support the transactional core processes. This research has the objective to identify the constitutive elements of CC IS, to analyze their effect on insurance value chains (particularly with regard to intermediation) as well as to design and test components of a reference architecture for customer-centric enterprise architectures in insurance.
While consumer centricity has been extensively discussed as a concept of organizational transformation in the marketing domain, there is little research on its operationalization as a characteristic of information systems and associated antecedents.
We review the marketing literature to understand generic organizational objectives of consumer centricity which are then generalized as characteristics of consumer-centric information systems. In a second step, we draw on socio-technical theory to conceptualize antecedents of consumer centricity as capabilities to align social and technical system components.
Our research contributes to the body of knowledge by theoretically deriving an operationalization and antecedents of consumer centricity in IS research. This paper lays the foundation for a structured review of IS literature to theorize on component alignment capabilities as antecedents of consumer centricity. It further is the basis for case study research to construct a nomological network for consumer-centric information systems.