Software Development for Columbia's Agencies and Insurers

Building for South Carolina state agencies

Columbia is where the State House stands, at Gervais and Main, and the agencies that run state programs buy software through a formal process. The state's Division of Procurement Services requires a vendor to register in SCEIS before it can bid or be issued a purchase order, and it names South Carolina Business Opportunities (SCBO) as the definitive listing of competitive procurements above the quote thresholds.

We take public sector work in two ways: as a subcontractor on a team led by a prime contractor, and by responding to RFPs. The parts of a public project we take on are the ones that are pure software: a case management or licensing tool, a public-facing form that feeds a back-office system, or a data migration off a platform the vendor no longer supports. Our government page covers the public sector software we build and how we handle records retention.

Insurers, administrators and benefits firms

Insurers run national operations from Columbia: Colonial Life is headquartered in the city, and Aflac made Columbia the national headquarters for its group insurance products in 2009. The city's economic development office also lists insurance service firms such as Seibels, which provides business process and third-party administration services for the personal and commercial insurance industry. Around firms like these sit agencies, administrators and service providers, often with the same problems at smaller scale.

The software this kind of operation needs is concrete:

• →Claim and application intake. Forms, PDFs and emailed attachments read and checked against policy data before a person keys anything. See document processing and intake forms.
• →Broker and member portals. A web app where an agency or member can see status and upload documents, instead of calling.
• →Servicing tools for staff. One screen that pulls a policy, its claims and its correspondence together, so a service rep stops switching between systems.

South Carolina's insurance data security law

South Carolina's Insurance Data Security Act (Title 38, Chapter 99 of the state code) requires each licensee to maintain a comprehensive written information security program with administrative, technical and physical safeguards (licensees with fewer than ten employees are among those exempt from that requirement), and to notify the Director of the Department of Insurance within 72 hours of determining that a cybersecurity event has occurred, when the Act's criteria are met. Those duties fall on the licensee, which must also require its third-party service providers to protect the nonpublic information they can access.

What we can do is build software that makes them easier to meet: access limited by role, a record of who viewed or changed nonpublic information, and logs that let your security team reconstruct an event quickly. On regulated builds we scope these requirements with your compliance team and counsel in the design phase.

Replacing systems that have run for decades

Agencies and carriers both tend to hold one system that everything depends on and nobody wants to touch. We start by reading what is actually there, then decide with you whether to wrap it with an API, move one function at a time, or replace it. Our legacy modernization and software project takeover pages cover both routes.