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.”
Standards setting
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.
Fireman’s Fund’s motivation is twofold, Cottman says. First is to provide a standard way for more than 3,000 independent agents to interact with Fireman’s Fund’s network. The second is to modernize its IT infrastructure and make it more manageable and flexible without having to touch any legacy code.
In the end, Cottman hopes to lay his hands on two Holy Grails for the insurance industry: straight-through processing, where the data is touched but once; and Single Entry Multiple Company Interface (SEMCI), which lets data be keyed in once and sent to multiple recipients regardless of platform.
Fireman’s Fund already has tested and deployed its first service, a billing inquiry system created from a legacy billing application. Independent agents that do business with Fireman’s Fund can access the service via the Fireman’s Fund Web site or they can stay in their agency management systems and submit a policy number that returns information on a customer’s billing status.
The integration with the agent’s legacy management systems is handled over the Web using an industry hub called Ivans Transformation Station, which can received data in any format and sent it out as an ACORD-formatted message.
The billing inquiry service is a simple data display mechanism and only the first step toward more sophisticated SOBAs.
The goal is to support more complex transactions, such as loss notification or quote generation, which include error checking and transactional rules. Fireman’s Fund is secretly working on two such services it would not identify. Based on ACORD XML, they will be made available to agents through the Fireman’s Fund Web site and via the Ivan’s integration hub. The company hopes to roll those services out in the next three to six months.
The company has built an infrastructure using tools from Webify Solutions to construct front-end interfaces to its services. In the middle is IBM’s WebSphere, including the WebSphere InterChange Server, which helps map ACORD to mainframe data structures.
Dealing with COBOL
Fireman’s Fund also has added ItemField’s ContentMaster to decode the complex COBOL-formatted records of its legacy applications and work alongside WICS to map those COBOL formats to ACORD-based service requests. Without ContentMaster, Cottman says, Fireman’s Fund would have had to develop and maintain its own proprietary adapters to decode its COBOL, or worse – touch the COBOL code.
“We didn’t want to create yet another layer of code we had to maintain,” Cottman says. “The key is to have the services and then to have the orchestration around those services to deliver on our business processes. In the past we have had hard-wired applications that do Step A, then Step B and then become monolithic applications.”
Cottman says the importance of ACORD is to have a common language and common format that is supported throughout the industry.
“All the agents need to do at some point is speak ACORD,” Cottman says. To help with that, he says Ivan’s and a similar service from Agency Management Systems called TransactNow will provide the connection to agents’ systems and transform the agents’ legacy data formats into ACORD messages that can be used to talk to the Web services run by the Fireman’s Fund.
“You see lots of flavors of these types of systems, lots of ways to try and achieve this,” Cottman says. He says many in the industry screen scrape a Web site in order to hide the site navigation needed to get at information.
“What we are endeavoring to do is true Web services transactions that are independent of the Web site navigation. And we should be able to aggregate the services together to support new business processes. That is a SOBA,” he says.
The effort and the technological advances are aimed at one thing, making Fireman’s Fund, which writes $5 billion in gross premiums per year, a more efficient provider of insurance services.
“We intend to be the easiest company in the industry to deal with; that is one reason we have modernized our systems,” says John Kozero, a spokesman for Fireman’s Fund.
“I don’t think you will find very many companies that have a greater accent on advanced capabilities for applications and services,” Kozero says.
