Zurich had very little in-house extranet expertise, so a lot of the technologies involved, like firewalls, were not core skills within the company. "It was the first time we were touching many of these new technologies," Colletti admits.

Probodh Chiplunkar, director of extranet field technical solutions for Business Objects in the US, was one of the experts enlisted to help Zurich implement these new technologies. He helped design the infrastructure for RiskIntelligence, and consulted on a number of other crucial areas of the project, including set-up of the clusters. He remembers that Zurich had plans to integrate its existing business processes, like automated document scheduling, with the new Business Object system at a very early stage.

"They were really cutting edge in that way," says Chiplunkar." There were processes they were already running that they wanted to integrate, and basically they wanted us to customise our products for them. In the end it was very much a refining process."

Chiplunkar also played a key role in mapping out the architecture of RiskIntelligence. He was central to deciding how Zurich's processes would best translate to the Web Intelligence system. It was he who determined what form the various customisations would take and who was responsible for writing any new code. He stresses that at the architecting stage three things are crucial: security, scalability and integration.

"People really need to understand the implications of these things," Chiplunkar says. "A lot of the time this is the first extranet that they're rolling out. It's not just a Business Objects' set-up. It's a core part of their e-business strategy."

Chiplunkar highlights security as a prime concern. Although the only data customers see is their own, Zurich's clients were understandably nervous about having their confidential claims information made accessible via the Web. To alleviate these worries it was decided that, in addition to the usual security measures, Zurich would also use Security Dynamics Technology's Secure ID tokens, which use randomly generated passwords to allow access to the system. "They're hard tokens, and that was really beneficial to us, because it was something our customers could touch and feel," Colletti says.

Colletti made it a habit to slip tokens into his pocket on his way to meetings. "Once we brought out a token for them to see and I explained how it works, security ceased to be an issue," he says.

RiskIntelligence was launched in November 1998, less than a year after the focus group in which clients first voiced their displeasure with the old system. Gone are the CD-ROMs and the dedicated workstations that provided only a handful of reports. Instead, clients now log in via Zurich's home page using a standard Web browser. Once inside, risk managers can access claims data that's updated daily and run up to 130 standard reports, as well as personalised ones developed by Colletti and his team.

Today, Zurich claims that RiskIntelligence serves 3000 users at nearly 600 companies. Although Colletti comes from an IT background, he insists that one of the main reasons RiskIntelligence is such a success is that it takes analysis tools away from the IT department and puts them in the hands of people who understand claims information inside and out. "Look, I'm an IT person - I know what it's like. When you have to write the requirements for a report and then hand it over to IT, the time frame can always change," he says with a knowing smile.

"The biggest benefit for us is that we give this tool to non-IT staff," Colletti says. "In fact, every report that's been developed for RiskIntelligence has been developed by people with a claims background; the people who actually write the reports have 10 or 15 years worth of claims experience. That's why we grew from 30 reports [in the initial release] to 130 reports in a relatively short period of time, and it's also why we've developed over 500 customised reports for customers. They're being developed by people who understand the data."