<<The insurance industry, which probably has more legacy mainframes per square inch than anywhere else, has a reputation as a conservative industry. However, a new report out of Insurance Networking News finds insurance companies may be on the verge of an SOA revolution.
In a Q&A with Mark Gorman, analyst with Tower Group, Gorman observes that "iInsurance carriers are increasingly looking to the promise of BI to help them make more precise, more accurate, more consistent and more timely decisions across a wide array of business processes. To do so they are enhancing their capabilities at capturing, analyzing and utilizing data." SOA enables BI services to be made "potentially available to any person, process or transaction regardless of the timing, location or type of transaction being executed," Gorman said. Gorman's associate, David West, elaborated on this convergence taking place between BI and SOA: "In addition to improvements in consistency, accuracy and timeliness of decisions, a key value proposition of SOA for BI is its financial return," he said. "Service-oriented BI systems carry a lower total cost of ownership. This architecture enables organizations to optimize their use of hardware so that components of BI systems run on the platform that makes the most sense from a cost/performance perspective." Areas where BI services are being employed include marketing applications, such as lead generation or lead assignment, product selection for cross-sell or up-sell opportunities, or channel selection for new product offers, Gorman says. Other areas include automated risk assessment and pricing precision capabilities during new business, and renewal application processing.>> You can read this at: http://www.soainaction.com/blog/2007/08/for_insurance_business_intelli.php Gervas
