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IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA)

The document provides an overview of the IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA), which aims to establish a common business architecture for the global insurance industry. The IAA defines core models and structures that can represent the diverse business requirements of insurers worldwide. It seeks to enable insurers to select "mix-and-match" software solutions by ensuring new systems are built upon consistent business foundations. The architecture was developed in response to insurers' needs for a shared framework following many failed integration projects.

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309 views2 pages

IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA)

The document provides an overview of the IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA), which aims to establish a common business architecture for the global insurance industry. The IAA defines core models and structures that can represent the diverse business requirements of insurers worldwide. It seeks to enable insurers to select "mix-and-match" software solutions by ensuring new systems are built upon consistent business foundations. The architecture was developed in response to insurers' needs for a shared framework following many failed integration projects.

Uploaded by

GabrielGarciaOrjuela
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA)

– An overview of the Insurance Business


Architecture

Jürgen Huschens, Marilies Rumpold-Preining

The IBM Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) provides an architectural


framework for the development of application solutions for the insurance industry.
At its core is a general Insurance Business Architecture developed to provide
common structures capable of representing the various, different business re-
quirements occurring in the worldwide insurance industry. We will focus on the
concepts, the contents and the positioning of the models representing this IAA In-
surance Business Architecture.

1 Introduction

Even though the first edition of this paper [DH98] was published several
years ago, and although there have been many application develoment pro-
jects in the insurance industry since then, the introductory remarks from
the first edition are still valid: The insurance industry is very closely re-
lated to information processing, since their production process is dealing
with an immaterial good, security, that requires information in order to be
established. Therefore many application systems in insurance companies
have their origins in the early days of computing and have to be rebuilt in
order to follow the current changes in the insurance markets. Many at-
tempts of package integration projects to replace core insurance functional-
ity basically failed. The challenge in providing state of the art core insur-
ance functionality is to fundamentally change the business architecture of
insurance systems from coexisting, line-of-business oriented transaction
systems to integrated enterprise-wide, information-oriented systems.
Moreover, new techniques and technologies (such as workflow manage-
ment, object technology, component-based development and the internet)
seem to be candidates to realize new business opportunities and to increase
competitiveness.
This results in a pressure for a new generation of application systems for
the insurance industry. Although there are many offerings for insurance-
670 Jürgen Huschens, Marilies Rumpold-Preining

specific software packages available, especially large and diverse insur-


ance companies have difficulties to find insurance software packages that
suit their business needs, and that fit in their interconnected application
landscape. The insurance industry expresses their need for a ‘mix-and-
match’-software market (see e.g.[Wa93], [GDV97]), allowing them to
1. buy application software for areas with low competitive relevance,
2. share and adopt application systems developed in joint efforts amongst
insurances companies or in cooperation with software vendors,
3. have the possibility for inhouse developments in areas where either the
relevance for competition is high or the necessity of differentiation from
the rest of the market is required.
Clearly, such a component-based software market requires open standards
for all involved technical dimensions. But experiences in analyzing soft-
ware package offerings and inhouse development experiences regarding
enterprise modelling led some insurance companies to the conclusion that
first of all a general Business Architecture for the insurance industry is
needed as a basic structure to ensure that the business requirements and
contents can be addressed. This need for a general Insurance Business Ar-
chitecture articulated by a group of insurance companies to IBM was the
beginning of IBM’s Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) project in
1990.
In this paper we intend to discuss the concepts, the contents and the po-
sitioning of the IAA Business Architecture. We intentionally exclude the
discussion of IAA-based application system models and application soft-
ware, i.e. the technical and software-infrastructural dimensions of an ap-
plication architecture, in order to keep a clean focus on the approach of an
Insurance Business Architecture.
The need for differentiating the generic structures from the requirements
populating the structure is crucial to allow several different business views
on the same topic. This can easily be studied in the field of Party Manage-
ment Systems of various insurance companies [Hu95]. Efforts of the Ger-
man Association of Insurance Companies (GDV) in establishing business
models for specific application areas suffer from neglecting this difference
[GDV97],[Di96]. Moreover, despite the progress made in the software in-
dustry to deliver and deploy component-based applications, the idea of
business-oriented modelling and standardization on a business modelling
level needs to be revitalized in order to come to usable, truly exchange-
able, but still durable software components for the insurance industry.

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