The need for more operational flexibility and increased information sharing, plus pressures to enable more efficient processing, are creating a new level of internal IT challenges across the insurance industry. In addition to the focus on optimizing existing processes, today’s insurers face diverse market demands – driving the need for changes in business capabilities and functionality. Companies are thus concentrating their efforts on areas that can help drive differentiation. As insurers look for opportunities to leverage their IT investments and unleash technology-enabled processes to resolve pressing business issues, it becomes clear that better ways of integrating technology are needed. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) may be the answer. At IBM, we believe that SOA can help insurance companies increase their market speed by creating, for example, a more integrated environment for claims processing, policy administration, and agent support. SOA may also help control costs by eliminating redundant interfaces, building on existing IT investments, and providing an infrastructure in which users can easily access information and perform transactions. But can SOA really influence the structure of insurance companies? Can it really change the way that these organizations interact with clients and agents? And can it help ensure that clients get the benefits and services that they need, and to which they are entitled? To answer these questions, business leaders must not only understand what SOA is, but also how to apply it strategically to resolve business problems specific to their organization and their industry. The following three scenarios – discussed in detail in the full version of this paper – show how SOA can help solve challenges that are familiar to the overall insurance industry. - Using a claims process scenario, we demonstrate how SOA can permit higher levels of systems integration and collaboration to support this process – one involving a large number of variables determined by line of business, type of loss, and severity of a claim. With SOA, the information held in other systems can be made available to the Claims Management System in a flexible, faster manner – simplifying the process and providing benefits for all parties involved.
- Currently, few insurance carriers permit a policyholder to make even the simplest change to an existing policy. By extending these capabilities directly to the customer, it is possible to create significant differentiation and competitive advantage. In the area of policy administration, we show how SOA enables insurance carriers to create a customer portal using standards-based, reusable services.
- Agents are another critical constituency that requires consideration. With SOA, carriers may change their systems at will, with minimal impact on the agent. The agents can do business using the software of their choice – relying on a standards-based interface to the carrier. This can help deliver operational advances that may assist carriers in becoming more agile and more responsive, while improving service levels and cutting development and maintenance costs for both the carrier and the agent.
In each scenario, value is returned to the carrier, its customers and its partners – making it a win-win-win approach. For each scenario, we describe the business problem and how it works today. We then discuss how the problem might be addressed with an SOA-based approach to technology integration. We show how the insurance systems in question interact using SOA, with terms and diagrams that clearly lay out the value proposition for business executives. We conclude each scenario by discussing the business value of the solution and the benefits that may be realized through the use of SOA techniques. These examples represent just three areas in which SOA can help insurance companies answer their internal challenges, while delivering improved service to policyholders and agents alike. At the same time, SOA is not a product, and cannot be purchased as such. There are a number of major software vendors, as well as numerous insurance industry-specific niche players, that have SOA-enabled products on the market. IBM and several other companies are working to develop Composite Business Services, an industry-specific set of services that can be used for new development, or to supplement and modernize existing application software. Once you have established an SOA infrastructure and reusable services in one part of your organization, successive projects can build upon that foundation. Eventually, we expect SOA to be well entrenched in the industry, so it’s best to start any evolution at your company today. Properly applied and nurtured, SOA can enable insurance companies to fundamentally alter business processes and provide better services to all constituents. How can IBM help? IBM Solutions: Each scenario in this paper relates to one or more different solutions. - Accelerating and simplifying the claims process
- Enabling policyholders to administer their own policies
- Core Insurance - Policy Administration Solutions
- Insurance Sales & Service Solutions
- Supporting and retaining agents
- Roadmap for Insurance Agent Collaboration
- Insurance Sales & Service Solutions
Application Services Offerings: - Application Development
- Business Application Modernization
- Complex Systems Integration
- Portals and Content Management
- Enterprise Architecture & Technology
- SOA Strategy & Transformation
- SOA Design, Development and Integration Services.
Insurance Process Acceleration (IPA) Framework, providing an SOA enterprise blueprint for deploying solutions that accelerate insurance business processes.
To read the full report, download the PDF file at the top of this page.
|
