The insurance industry needs to invest in an evolving mix of people and technology to prepare for a “post-digital” era, New York-based Deloitte L.L.P. said in a report released Monday.

The report, Insurance Tech Trends 2013: Elements of Postdigital, says a convergence of five technology trends — analytics, mobile computing, social media, cloud computing and cyber liability — ultimately will reshape the way the insurance industry operates.

“These five forces offer a new set of tools for business, opening the door to new rules for operations, performance and competition,” the report states. “The post-digital era, like the post-industrial era, reflects a 'new normal' for business and a new basis for competition.”

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Chief information officers at insurance companies will be tasked with leading the transformation to this new era, according to Deloitte.

“Insurance CIOs are in a unique position to be the harbingers of change; to serve as catalysts across the executive suite, helping others understand the boundaries of the possible; to force thinking beyond veneering existing solutions and processes; to stand accountable for realizing transformation; and to drive business model innovation and enhance the customer and producer experiences,” the report states.

Yet, to full take advantage of emerging technologies, insurers first need to reinvent the core claims, policy administration and billing systems that constituted the backbone of their infrastructures for decades.

“The traditional core systems made sense in the days of automating planned, predictable and repeatable business processes, but times are changing,” the report states. “Business processes are less planned and predictable than in the past.”

In addition to investing in technologies, insurers need to invest in people who are fluent in the new technologies, the report states, noting this especially true in the area of data and analytics.

“Information has been the white whale of the last decade of IT investment, but few organizations have mastered core data management across the enterprise — much less higher-order disciplines like business intelligence, visualization or advanced analytics,” the report states. “Discovering useful patterns in big data — and knowing how to exploit them — often requires a baseline of data quality, governance and stewardship of the raw information assets — as well as the ability to understand and correlate relationships between data sources.”

The report is available here.