This Monday morning “think” from the National Underwriter was cut short when I was posting this morning – and I left for an appointment laughing at the thought of encountering a system error in the NU server as I was attempting to post the link and teaser text for a technology article!
Given the scheme, I found this confirmation that IT systems are talking more and better than ever of considerable interest.
Service-oriented architecture is today perhaps the most widely used, yet widely misunderstood structure for insurance industry computer systems…The insurance industry has, over the past four years or so, bought heavily into this concept in terms of quicker software development and a host of efficiencies that promise lower costs…”While it’s not as sexy as some of the loftier SOA hype, Web services and SOA in insurance have contributed mainly as a form of better ‘plumbing,’” said Jeff Goldberg, senior analyst at Boston-based Celent.
“Essentially, SOA has been a set of technologies and practices for more efficient sharing of data and transactional capabilities between systems, both internal and external, in a reusable way, allowing the value of systems investments to be leveraged repeatedly in subsequent initiatives,” he explained. “While this may not sound like an enterprise-redefining technology, it’s key to the [chief information officer’s] mission of doing more with less, and it’s a foundational change that will pave the way for future flexibility and efficiency.”
…The future of SOA in the insurance industry “is not just flexibility and efficiency,” he concluded, “but also the ability to take the distributed servers and software built up or licensed in the data center and make them operate as one integrated business system.”
Technology can reduce costs and speed our economic recovery – as long as it’s properly understood and properly used. In that regard, however, we have a lot of catching up to do.