The Missing Opinion

The other day I received an e-mail invite to a webinar, "SOA & the Insurance Industry: Voice of the Experts." The event was organized by InfoWorld, and included speakers from the TowerGroup, BEA, and Zurich Financial Services. Naturally, my interest was piqued.I watched the webinar, and there was a lot of good information. I noticed there was someone missing from the discussion. I have been working in the financial services industry for twenty-two years, and the biggest challenge has been involving business users. We do not hear enough from the business user.

If you do a search for SOA and insurance on the web, you will find plenty of articles and presentations by information technology people. You will be hard-pressed to find anything by the business user. A policy administration system is the heart of an insurance company. It is much more than connecting some services or being a presence on the web. It is the embodiment of a set of business rules and processes.

What makes a successful SOA project is the connection between business users and information technology users, not the way the services are connected.

- By Howard E. Kennedy ISO Rating Service Technical Liaison/Technical Architect ISO-ITS