Business Services Fabric: The Foundation for Adaptive Insurer
by Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Gone are the days of non-stop corporate growth when businesses lived by the adage “you have to spend money to make money.” In the current economic landscape, businesses looking to slash expenses without sacrificing their competitive edge are turning to their technology infrastructures to streamline operations and respond better to shifting market dynamics.  This shift is especially pronounced in the insurance industry, which has never been known for cutting-edge IT innovation and is now suffering as a result. Facing rapidly diminishing profit margins, insurance firms are revisiting their IT strategies to revive momentum and create more responsive and effective businesses that meet customer and partner demands for better and more accessible support.

Recognizing that antiquated IT systems and inefficient practices must be addressed, insurance firms are turning to business process management (BPM) to outfox their competition and resuscitate their profitability.. BPM provides insurance companies with tools and methodology for business process transformation that can significantly cut response times and reduce costs.  

Putting BPM into practice can be challenging, particularly for insurance companies with processes that span multiple platforms and systems cobbled together from mergers and technology upgrades.  It is particularly difficult for IT leaders who must balance the needs of the business with the realities of their technology environment. IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric helps companies accelerate BPM in the production environment by delivering the dynamic tools to create and administer composite business applications based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), transactional applications which connect business processes to the information resources that drive those operations. IBM's Business Services Fabric is designed to help organizations improve responsiveness to customer needs by helping them create services and implement policy-driven composite business applications quickly. This agility not only helps firms quickly adapt to catastrophic events and but also manage day-to-day market changes at a lower cost than conventional application deployment methods.

Companies can also use the IBM WebSphere Business Services Fabric to coordinate business activities from multiple systems in order to reuse functionality and accelerate process improvement. This capability is a particularly important in the insurance industry, where many companies need to pull together data and services supported on multiple applications and lack the funds or the time to simply strip out old software and systems replace them with new application platforms.

For Property and Casualty insurers, IBM offers an optional Industry Content Pack for WebSphere Business Services Fabric.  Assets included in the content pack enable previously distinct and incompatible applications to communicate with each other.

Similar to other content packs for the banking, healthcare, and telecommunications industries, IBM's Property and Casualty solution helps insurance companies speed application rollouts by supplying pre-built composite applications for processing insurance claims based industry-specific standards from the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), European e-Business Expert Group for Insurance (eEG7), and the IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA). The solution uses discrete business functionality components that include a catalog of industry terms and relationships. These components help cut development time and can be reused in new applications, in schemas and Web service interfaces that are particular to the property and casualty industry, and a logical data model specific to the insurance sector. 

The IBM Content Pack for the insurance industry also incorporates a set of ACORD Property and Casualty standard services that set common functions such as validation and transformation into motion. Firms can also use the documentation and sample scenarios included in the content pack to help them customize applications for their own environment. What the Property and Casualty Content Pack for the WebSphere Business Services Fabric provides is the standards-based platform firms need to speed application development time and the extensibility required to create process improvements specific to an organization's conditions. IBM also offers an SOA roadmap that outlines a practical IT strategy for modernizing insurance systems to support the kinds of real-time access to policy and claims data agents need to compete.

In practical terms, WebSphere Business Services Fabric can, for example, help an insurance company improve the agility and responsiveness of its formerly siloed approach to providing quotes in favor of a dynamic model that taps multiple agents to produce a solution tailored to fit the customers' particular coverage and pricing requirements. The result is a foundation for advancing business to become not only more efficient but also more responsive to  customer and agent needs  The payoff comes when a firm not only survives but thrives — even in a weak economy in a difficult market. 

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