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Are Insurers Gobbling Up SOA-Enabled BI Tools?
September 2007The Hartford P&C Co. built a single consumer view for both its new business and its renewable policies, including a customer application that gives it instantaneous information about its customers. Its personal lines business also has been able to bring together some 30 different third-party data sources in the company and put them into one source.
The Hartford's personal lines now has a single manner in which it processes motor vehicle reporting (MVR) across the entire company. The insurer built a single service that enables The Hartford to get immediate access to data across the company and work real-time with the states provided to gather MVR information. That service is now used in six different places across the firm, for everything from renewal purposes to billing purposes. Meanwhile, The Hartford's commercial lines business has made great strides in automated decisioning, improving its billing and creating new automated underwriting. The carrier's agents are now able to receive information in real time and provide quotes to commercial customers quickly.
The Hartford owes these efficiencies to its adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business intelligence (BI) tools, whose advantages are manifold, including providing real-time service.
"The opportunity from The Hartford's perspective, and what I am starting to see in the industry, is [that we insurers are] taking what we have and creating real-time capabilities out of it," says Gary Plotkin, CIO of the Hartford, Conn.-based insurer.
Some insurers are exploring SOA-enabled BI tools, and others are trumpeting them as revolutionary. To some, BI alone is critical, whereas SOA is merely a cool buzzword. "I think of SOA as this year's CRM," says Bob Goldberg, vice president of information technology of Colorado Farm Bureau Insurance Co., a Centennial, Colo.-based firm providing insurance to farmers, ranchers and others in Colorado. "There are always these acronyms that go throughout the industry. Vendors need to say they are using that acronym to sell their product." He argues that organizations, his included, have been using SOA for years without actually calling it that. "If you have a good object-oriented framework, isn't that really what SOA is all about-being able to use your objects that are in your framework to be able to do a variety of different tasks?" he asks, then adds that his firm has been doing this.
Some insurers and technology providers dispute that claim. "Certainly, I would say that all of the major companies are looking at SOA," says Pat Saporito, insurance solutions director and part of the enterprise performance management (EPM) center of excellence for Business Objects Inc., a San Jose, Calif., BI software company. Yet, she too, recognizes that vendors sense the seduction in saying their BI solutions are SOA-enabled, saying: "Most every one of them would tell you that they offer SOA-enabled solutions." Still, for her, there is a legitimate movement afoot among insurers to adopt such solutions, one akin to when companies went from client-server to Web-enabled applications.
MAJOR DRIVERS
Part of the reason why insurers are considering SOA is that their technology environments are increasingly sophisticated, and SOA provides a common "language" that enables applications to communicate with one another, be it on a mainframe, client-server or Web tier. SOA provides "drilldown capabilities," taking business services and decomposing them down to smaller services or activities.
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