Harleysville's IT Successes Will Benefit Nationwide - Harleysville CIO

The proposed merger of Nationwide (Columbus, Ohio) and Harleysville Insurance (Harleysville, Pa.) will yield complementary strengths at the local and enterprise level, as well as experience with particular technology areas, according to Harleysville CIO Arne Herenstein. Announced last week, the merger is yet to meet regulatory approval, but Nationwide CEO Steve Rasmussen met with Harleysville staff last week and was cordially and enthusiastically received by the Pennsylvania-based company's associates, according to Herenstein.

Arne Herenstein

"It's too early to tell how everything will fit together, but both organizations have great strengths, depth of knowledge and successful implementation experience that will be valuable," Herenstein says. "I think we'll learn from each other and the outcome will be a very strong IT organization."

Harleysville contributes the fruits of a long-standing focus on agent ease-of-doing-business, according to Herenstein. The regional P&C insurer has worked with agents and their customer service representatives in a continuous improvement effort to generate leading-edge agent facing capabilities, he reports.

"We've had an ongoing pattern of releases for the last three or four years of implementing changes that make doing business with Harleysville easier and easier," Herenstein comments. "We release new bundles of functionality every six weeks." Other market-leading technology developments that Harleysville brings to the table, include the company's systems integration platform, built on services-oriented architecture (SOA). "It's a uniform platform built on standards, that has enabled the movement of data from place to place so much more efficiently than the point-to-point approach that had been standard in the industry," Herenstein says. "The platform extracts important policy data, broken down into transactional components and retained in a data mart which may be accessed by any application that needs information about a given policy or customer."

Harleysville's IT organization has completed the first phase of the operational data warehouse (ODW) using its SOA-based platform. This will be a key factor in the successful implementation of another core system, Guidewire ClaimCenter, to be integrated with it, according to Herenstein. In addition to simplifying connections between core systems, the integration platform will ease the exchange of vital data with other applications, processes and, of course, Nationwide. It will also make it easier to modify or upgrade core systems in the future. "This is the real breakthrough: it means you can change your key platforms -- it will be much less of a challenge because the data is available, in the operational data warehouse," Herenstein explains. "The persistence of data in a consumable form, with data definitions, is a huge simplifying factor in systems development and upgrade."

Among capabilities potentially useful to Nationwide is the service bus that Harleysville created through what Herenstein calls comprehensive use of webMethods (a subsidiary of Software AG, Darmstadt, Germany). The service bus has reduced the total cost of ownership of applications by reducing the high cost of maintaining point-to-point interfaces, according to Herenstein. He also cites Harleysville's development of an integrated business process environment geared to meet the needs of agents, and the development of an underwriting workspace/workbench that will make it quicker and easier for agents to bind new commercial policies.

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio