The insurance industry and media are way behind the construction industry in the use of technology. Blue Shield, Travelers, and Specialty Publishing(writers of Constructech Magazine) are perfect examples of companies that still believe the Fax machine is modern technology. I have had the unfortunate experience of having to work with all three of these companies laboriously painful paper processes recently. Blue Shield who provides our employee health insurance plan does not have email access, they can not send or receive emails. Everything has to be mailed or faxed. Their invoices are 5-10 pages long with many pages duplicated. When I asked them to email these to me their response "we don't do email".
Travelers a company all of us in the construction industry know well has a slight advantage over Blue Cross. This year they provided me a temporary email address for submitting our 2009 payroll records for their annual review. This is a lot better then last years 30+ page fax I had to send them. There is still room for improvements, they should really provide clients with a portal for uploading this information and tracking the status of invoices and renewels. Even the state of CA DGS lets us go online to upload our Small business certificate documents for renewal. Travelers has made some progress but still has a way to go. Finally the most embarrassing example is the media industries adoption of technology, Specialty Publishing.  At the end of last year I ordered a copy of their IT playbook. To do this I went to their website and filled out the order form, several days later I received an email with a form that I needed to complete and submit my credit card information with. Earth to Constructech you should have collected this information when I filled out my order request online. You took what should have been a 2 minute process to order into a 20+ minute process of emails, faxes, and filling out multiple forms. Next the USPS damages the magazine so bad that it was returned so they have to mail me a new one. Had Constructech been operating in 2010 instead of 1995 I should have downloaded this after placing my order online. The worst part is the magazine is supposed to be experts on technology in this industry. Their latest example of being clueless is their articles about blogging, yet they themselves do not have a blog.
In the mean time construction companies, facility owners, and engineering firms are disposing of their paper processes at a record rate and moving to web based project management applications, BIM modelling, blogs, and virtual office faster then these three companies can refill the paper tray on their fax machine. 