“Insurers should ‘stay the course.’ They need to better understand their core business processes and clearly articulate the benefits of streamlining them. They must continue to eliminate redundancy and evolve to the new SOA technologies to enable these business processes.”

Mike Donati, Senior Vice President, Operations, SunGard iWORKS EIM

Welcome Mike. What is your view on what separated the successes from the failures last year in integrating data and improving STP?

The companies that have been most successful are those that have begun a systematic approach to reducing redundant systems and decoupling core functional components, such as commission and claims processing from monolithic policy administration systems. Once the processes are decoupled and functionally isolated, and the data integrity assured, there are a growing number of tools and data standards that will assist the move to straight-through processing.

Your thoughts on next steps for 2008?

Companies must continue to develop best practices in building SOA-based systems. Once companies address the data redundancy issues, they can use Web services to access the business processes inside the “black box.” And once the data is consolidated, it can be used not only to drive STP but also to provide support, better reporting and analytics.

Advancements?

As the industry experience with SOA grows, we continue to see more seasoned approaches and ease-of-use tools to support integration. Data standards have grown from general awareness to industry-wide solutions for shared processes. For instance, we see a growing number of service providers and vendors providing STP links supporting distributor eContracting and licensing. The industry as a whole will benefit from these shared solutions.

And your one message to insurance companies Mike?

Insurers should “stay the course.” They need to better understand their core business processes and clearly articulate the benefits of streamlining them. They must continue to eliminate redundancy and evolve to the new SOA technologies to enable these business processes.