In one respect, however, Colletti and his team at Zurich were victims of their own success. As corporate risk management professionals, they were used to playing it safe. Constantly hedging their bets against failure, they were experts in discovering new ways to minimise loss. But runaway success? That, they didn't foresee.

The old system that Zurich replaced had 250 users. RiskIntelligence reached 1000 users in its first eight months. Zurich had seriously underestimated demand for the system. As a result the company suffered setbacks due to a lack of scalability, and often struggled to meet user expectations.

"It was something we hadn't counted on," Colletti admits. "Our equipment wasn't up to the capacity that we needed, so we were playing catch-up for about a year and a half. Back then we were quite a bit behind the curve. Now we're always just a little bit ahead of the curve."

Zurich has updated and refined the original application over the past three years, Colletti says. For example, large companies often change carriers over time, and since many of the companies Zurich deals with don't write all their insurance through the company, Colletti recently added to the ability to import data from other carriers.

The next step for RiskIntelligence is a document sharing project, known as Information Exchange, which incorporates what Colletti calls "unstructured data" into the system. "Eighty per cent of what workers deal with in insurance is unstructured data - agreements, word documents, Excel spreadsheets and the like," he explains. By the second quarter of 2002, Zurich intends to expand the extranet solution to provide not only the structured data of the kind that exists in RiskIntelligence, but also all the unstructured documentation that goes with it.

Colletti cites loss-sensitive billing (when Zurich sends regular bills to customers for the losses they've incurred during a particular month), as an example of the type of service the new system provides. "We can now send the bill over the Internet, and customers can run a query that allows them to see all the different things that make up that bill," he says.

Colletti believes other organisations can learn - and profit - from Zurich's example. That's what brought him to Sydney to evangelise for the extranet cause in the first place. He points out that what began as a customer complaint eventually ended with Zurich stealing a long march on its competitors, none of whom have similar extranet offerings today he claims.

The financial industry in particular, Colletti says, has a lot to gain from Zurich's extranet implementation. "For companies like us, which have a lot of information about their customers, being able to give it back to those customers is a huge benefit," he says. In Zurich's case "benefit" translates to a sizeable annual fee along with the $US400,000 it no longer has to spend producing CD-ROMs for clients each year - not to mention a welcome increase in customer retention.

"Our customers are actually paying us for their own information," Colletti says. "But it's all in the way we give it to them. We're giving them intelligence, not just data."