Taking paper out of insurance processes is a trendy IT goal due to environmental and cost concerns. And in life insurance, where sample illustrations and draft policy documents can run into the dozens of pages, there are many areas that can be targeted to cut paper.

Prudential's EPreview initiative focused on the policy review process. Originally, it processed all new policies from producers overnight in one batch. The polices were printed and reviewed by operations the following morning. Now, a PDF of a policy immediately after the underwriting department's approval, so operations can review this digital version the same day.

What happened in the middle? Check out the article I wrote for I&T sister site InformationWeek on EPreview, when it won a Business Innovator award from that publication. In the article, Prudential's director of project management Teresa Anderson discusses:

• integration and middleware changes to Prudential's mainframes and servers
• changing the agent to allow requests for electronic previews
• piggybacking on a new version of Prudential's life insurance application, and
• a rapid prototyping approach to developing the capability.