What IMIA expects from its members and delegates and vice versa

Table of contents

• Vision and mission
• Landscape and stakeholders
• Expectations of IMIA from its members and delegates and vice versa
  • General expectations, missions
  • What can IMIA expect from its members and delegates?
  • What can members and delegates expect from IMIA?
  • Roles and responsibilities of IMIA Delegates
  • Roles and responsibilities of the Executive Committee
• Conclusions

1. Vision and mission

The International Engineering Insurers Association (IMIA) is a forum for promoting, understanding and best practice in the field of engineering insurance.

IMIA’s mission is to build a world-wide and international network for engineering insurers to share experiences, discuss and develop new ideas and – through its annual conferences, working groups and communications – to investigate and share knowledge on emerging and critical issues.

Furthermore IMIA is a technical forum for analysing advances in technology, causes of loss, changes in the maintenance and operation of machinery and other technological innovations.

The international engineering insurance community is composed of interested underwriters, claims experts, brokers, loss adjusters and reinsurers.

Identified interesting and relevant topics are discussed and investigated within the working groups.

3. Expectations of IMIA from its members and delegates and vice versa

3.1 General expectations, missions

IMIA is a mutual organisation highly depending on an interacting behaviour between its members as well as between these members and the IMIA institutions to achieve the optimal performance of the organisation. As in every other organisation, roles and responsibilities have to be agreed in order to facilitate the cooperation and to improve its results. Therefore this paper is intended to give an overview of the expectations, roles and responsibilities within IMIA.

IMIA expects from its delegates and members to assume responsibility to be active contributors and ambassadors between the organisation and the engineering insurance community.

On the other hand delegates and members can expect from IMIA to enable and co-ordinate a platform which allows the members and delegates to exchange their experiences to obtain best practices and knowledge for the benefit of their companies and / or associations. In addition the EC is expected to ensure transparency and acceptance of the managerial duties performed.

3.2 What can IMIA expect from its members and delegates?

IMIA and the EC as the executive body of IMIA have the following expectations of its members and delegates.

• In order to contribute to the IMIA objectives associations and companies should ideally identify experienced professionals as delegates.
• Members and delegates are expected to collect relevant local knowledge and interesting information to be debated, edited and published within IMIA.
• The knowledge collected within IMIA should be returned to their own market, local association or company and shared with their peers.
• In order to ensure and enforce the popularity of IMIA, the marketing of the organisation and its objectives and aims should be carried out.
• To keep IMIA and its know-how up to date and to guarantee the availability of the latest information, all members should actively contribute to working groups, discussion forums, to the contents of the IMIA web site and to the risk, underwriting and claims library.

The network of engineering insurance professionals should be promoted and marketed.

3.3 What can members and delegates expect from IMIA?

The fulfilment of the above mentioned expectations allows members and delegates to expect a variety of services from IMIA to support them in performing their business activities successfully and profitably.

• IMIA provides a forum to discuss, evaluate and promote state of the art principles of engineering insurance.
• IMIA identifies, collects, coordinates and discusses topics relevant to the international engineering insurers community and/or of general interest to the public.
• IMIA operates the web site displaying appropriate information on engineering insurance and in particular relevant to underwriting and claims handling.
• In order to satisfy all members’ requirements, IMIA collects members needs and enables a productive and efficient exchange of opinions and experiences among delegates. In addition the organisation reports relevant information and opinions discussed within IMIA to the public.

3.4 Roles and responsibilities of IMIA Delegates

The previously mentioned expectations towards the IMIA members and delegates can be transformed into activities which should be carried out either between, before or during the annually held conferences.

Between the annual conferences the delegates should

• proactively contribute to the information exchange and networking between IMIA members and with the IMIA institutions.
• The delegates should contribute to the working groups and facilitate the contribution of their staff members.
• Furthermore they should forward interesting claims examples to the IMIA secretariat for publication on the web site in order to share them with the engineering community.
• In order to keep the IMIA topics up to date, topics relevant to the insurance community, should be suggested for debate, investigated and finally published by IMIA (e.g. web site or conference).

Every delegate is seen as an ambassador of the engineering insurance community and as a representative of the IMIA.

• The delegates should serve as spokesmen of the engineering insurance community and communicate key messages from and about IMIA to their association, local insurance market, own company and to the public.
• Such communications can consist of the presentation of relevant IMIA papers in respective national committees or company seminars or national and local events (risk management, insurance conferences, company seminars, etc.), especially as a follow up of the annual conference.

In order to ensure a productive and relevant outcome for the insurance market from the annual conferences, the delegates should suggest working group topics to the EC by the first quarter in order to enable prioritisation. This gives the delegates the chance to feed in their ideas and the ideas of their represented members in order to obtain a qualitative investigation on the relevant topics.

• In order to support and develop IMIA’s recognized market overview of the engineering markets, the delegates should contribute to the collection of data (statistics) and to the timely submission of the national report.
• The delegates should furthermore collect topics of interest to be analysed, discussed or presented during the annual conference.
• To make the IMIA web site as attractive and valuable as possible, useful and relevant information should be chosen in order to show it on the web site.

During the conference the delegates should actively participate at the discussion sessions and contribute to the conference with views and experiences gathered by the engineering insurance community within their local association or their market / company.

• In order to make the discussions at the conference as fruitful as possible the delegates should act as contributors and moderators for workshops on selected topics.
• Interesting and relevant claims to the engineering community should be presented and discussed.

Furthermore the delegates should contribute to the process of electing and confirming the members of the EC by helping to identify suitable candidates.

3.5 Roles and responsibilities of the Executive Committee

The EC has the full authority to act for IMIA.

The multiple tasks and responsibilities on behalf of the delegates are faced by corresponding roles and responsibilities on behalf of the EC. These lead to specific tasks which have to be carried out by the members of the EC between, before and during the annually held conferences.

The EC has the responsibility for the planning and preparation of the annual conference which is one of the main activities of IMIA.

• To begin with the specific details of the conference are to be organised in close contact with the hosting organisation.
• In order to enable a valuable and fruitful conference the details of the presentations, of relevant topics (presentations at the conference, ad hoc working groups during or between the conference(s), annual working groups, permanent working groups …..) are to be organised and coordinated.
• In addition the details and format of national market reports (optimising the format of statistics, country profiles and claims information) have to be defined.

Furthermore and in order to develop the organisation further the EC should identify potential new members, delegates and EC members between the annual conferences.

The EC has to ensure transparency and acceptance of the managerial duties performed.

• During the year the IMIA brand is marketed by the EC throughout the engineering community and potential new members are to be identified.
• Besides the finding of new members, contacts to “passive members” of the engineering community and to the public are to be enforced.
• In order to inform the general public and specific organisations (authorities, associations, insurance press, etc.) about the IMIA activities and to spread the relevant information throughout the markets, the EC reports findings, opinions and relevant knowledge to the appropriate sources.
• To develop the knowledge further and to share interesting information with the IMIA members the EC publishes interesting claim reports and other important information on the web site.
• In addition the work of annual and/or permanent working groups is coordinated and facilitated. Once the annual conference is finished relevant results and important conclusions from the conference are communicated and published to the general public (press releases, interviews and articles).

4. Conclusions

IMIA is a mutual organisation with the aim to generate, develop and share relevant engineering insurance knowledge with its members and the international engineering insurance community. The mutual set-up requires a distribution of roles and responsibilities in order to ensure optimal results and added value to the daily work of all IMIA members and participants while carrying out their business operations.

Therefore the IMIA as an organisation expects from its members to build bridges between the organisation and the engineering insurance community and to be active contributors and ambassadors with the aim of fulfilling IMIA’s objectives.

A task of the EC is to listen to the needs and requirements of the IMIA members, to promote the exchange of experiences in order to maintain best practices within the engineering insurance community. In addition the EC is to ensure transparency and acceptance of the managerial duties performed.