Doug Safford from AllState Insurance gave a fascinating overview of a large Insurance IT department’s migration from a high-overhead ($1B pa budget!) mainframe shop to an architecture-driven organisation. This primarily revolved around the introduction of a standard ESB – a business event bus in this case, with a standard middleware solution (TIBCO EMS) with a standard framework (to handle the governance needs of tracking, logging, etc). It also involved much simplification of the IT processes: going from 10 to 2 data centers, for example, and from 15,000 (!!) to just 4 (!!!) AS400-class servers.
Doug mentioned that the enablers for their Business Process Management were frameworks, services, events and rules. Of these:
- Services are carefully managed: they have deployed 4,000+ TIBCO BusinessWorks engines in the service and framework areas!
- Moving to an Event Driven Architecture allowed much more business control of their business events, such as standardised routing and de-duping. The events feed their CEP engines as well as their Data Warehouses for analytics.
- Separation of the business logic / rules was seen as critical in such a regulated industry; they could not afford to have volatile rules replicated in software code around their systems. AllState have standardised on TIBCO BusinessEvents as their rules engine (with 800+ engines today, and the fastest growing tool deployment for them).
In terms of the ROI for their investment, Doug mentioned:
- Marketing campaigns can now be deployed from new in weeks rather than 6-12 months, or from existing campaign templates in days rather than months.
- Rule changes, such as for routing leads to agents, can be done overnight, usually from the BAM reports. In one example they monitored the success rates for agents in closing business, re-routed more leads to them, to gain a 15% increase in closing rates…
I would not be at all surprised to see this AllState IT transformation to be covered in business management books and MBA programs in future!
