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Migrating to a new messaging system is a tedious, complex and risky process. And since this isn’t something you do everyday, you need to know "best practices" to ensure a successful migration.
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Comprehensive Network & Voice Management Visit CA Network & Voice Management Resource Center and get insights into industry best practices, information that helps you to address your challenges.
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Insurance provider Fireman's Fund Insurance hopes to set its industry ablaze with a project that will turn its mainframe applications into a set of network services that provide real-time transactions over the Web to its thousands of independent agents.
It's a heady goal in an industry where integration historically has been hamstrung by proprietary systems that cannot talk to one another both on the insurance agent front end and insurance provider back end.
What Fireman's Fund hopes to ultimately create is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with the functions of its multiple legacy policy administration and billing systems broken down into reusable components. Those components, which will use an industry standard called ACORD-XML as a standard data format, will be molded to the Fireman's Fund's business processes and used to create new applications to trump the competition.
The components, which the company is creating without touching any of its legacy code, can be assembled on the fly into ad hoc applications creating what Gartner has termed the service-oriented business application (SOBA). Gartner predicts by 2008 more than 70% of companies will be doing business-to-business collaboration via SOBAs.
Earlier this year, Fireman's Fund outsourced to IBM its entire IT hardware infrastructure, and signed a 10-year, $94 million contract for IBM to provide all application development and maintenance to jump-start the SOA transformation.
"We have this monolithic environment with multiple back-end legacy systems and putting in a service-oriented architecture should help us break those monolithic applications into consumable units," says Roger Cottman, IT product director for Fireman's Fund in Novato, Calif. "It's not functionality tied to a screen, it is functionality waiting to be used."
One of Cottman's primary building blocks is ACORD XML, a set of standard messaging formats for executing transactions and exchanging policy information in three areas of insurance, including Fireman's Fund's property/casualty business. The standards were developed by the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), which has spent 30 years developing insurance industry standards, first with paper forms, then with EDI, and now XML.
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