e-Business Case Studies

Minister's Forerword
Introduction
Credits
Acknowledgements

IBM IISL

PROJECT OBJECTIVE

E-COMMERCE ENABLED CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT FOR THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY

The IBM Corporation first started operations in Ireland in 1956. IBM Ireland Information Services (IISL) was established in 1984 to develop software and provide software services to IBM. IBM IISL develops business solutions for IBM’s customers in banking and insurance and its products are installed in over sixty countries around the world.

Business Case for e-Commerce Infrastructure Project

The insurance industry, globally, is experiencing an unparalleled pace of change. In an era of deregulation, increasing client awareness and technological innovation, new competitors are making a growing impact in a world once dominated by traditional insurance companies. Existing financial service providers such as banks and even retail organisations are growing their market share. These industries have always had a greater focus on customer service then the insurance industry. Meanwhile, insurance companies are adopting new technology to lower costs and enhance their profile for provision of customer service. Telemarketing, Internet trading and bundling of products traditionally sold on a strict line-of-business basis, (e.g. life assurance, personal pensions, group cover, motor and health insurance). The effect of these changes is that the insurance industry now needs to implement new business models based on a client-centric strategy, namely Customer Relationship Management (CRM). IBM sees the new e-Commerce technologies as an important vehicle both supporting and defining the business models the insurance sector will use. The aim of the eContact project is to create the key components of such an e-Commerce infrastructure for the insurance industry.

E-Business Solution

IBM IISL developed eContact using an existing IBM insurance solution called CIIS (Client Integrated Information System) and standard eBusiness elements based on IBM’s eBusiness framework. The eContact infrastructure is built using three important standards based technologies, namely XML, Enterprise Java Beans and a newly emerging standard called IAA (Insurance Application Architecture) which standardises many of the business objects required for the development of insurance applications. By using a standardised infrastructure, eContact can be integrated together with existing legacy software and indeed with software from other vendors.

The results of the eContact project are impressive:

Who Will Benefit from this e-Commerce Infrastructure Development?

Based on the results of this project, the IBM software group have made a major change in their approach to insurance IT business. IBM has started implementing a new insurance framework called laFEB with IBM IISL as a technology leader. This framework is based on the technology implemented in CIIS (XML, EJB) validated in Dublin as part of the eContact project. The success of the project has resulted in a decision to invest in further development work in Ireland. The investment will result in an infrastructure product that will be marketed globally.

EContact providers a single customer view across multiple channels, offering insurance companies - and their brokers, agent and mobile sales forces - a practical way of consolidating active customer information from a variety of sources into a single view. This information can be stored and accessed later from a central customer database by a sales person who is prompted to offer additional products of interest. At the same time, customers can access a coherent view of the company through all the different points of contact, namely marketing, sales, service and fulfilment.

IBM IISL
2 Burlington Road
Dublin 4
Tel: + 353 1 815 4503
www.ie.ibm.com
barryp_mcenroe@ie.ibm.com