Why choose a single tool?

Last week at the Valuation Actuaries Symposium I was able to attend a session hosted by Milliman at the Embassy Suites Hotel during which the MG-ALFA modeling product and the MG-Triton Valuation product were discussed and reviewed in the context of how they contributed to their combined effectiveness.

One of the questions raised during the session focused on the possibility of using a single modeling tool for both deterministic and Stochastic modeling. My interpretation of this question was , would it be possible in the future to have a single modeling tool for all purposes?

My reaction to this question was, why would we want to limit ourselves to a single tool? It might be easier to provision and train your team on one tool, but in an increasingly specialized world it seems that we would be missing out on a lot of expertise.

As an audience member I had the opportunity to add comments to the answer on the question. All I could say is that as a representative of Microsoft, I felt my way to add value to this community is by working to make all the tools for actuaries available on a single easily accessed and flexibly deployed platform.

I'd love to hear your opinions on this subject. Is it a worthy goal to get all the tools on a single compute platform?

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I've gotten some response on this post and encourage you to add your own