Report Summary:

Despite the hype over SOA's transformational potential, insurer business and technology executives need to understand both the short-term and long-term potential value.

This report provides an alternative to the traditional view of "SOA Maturity Levels" and stresses that the formulation of an SOA strategy must reflect business strategy and business mandates for change.

SOA has a record of creating business value across the industry whether used for services-based application integration, application componentization, or as a basis for developing a business process architecture

This report cites public examples with real quantitative success metrics across all three of these areas from companies like AAA Carolinas, Allstate, Guardian Life, Hanover, MetLife, Mutual of Omaha, New York Life, Penn National, Swiss Re, and The Hartford.

The report also stresses the importance of metrics and provides guidance and examples of how to develop and maintain metrics to communicate the value of SOA to business executives.

CONTENTS

Introduction…2
SOA for Insurance 101…3
Re-Contextualizing "SOA Maturity" to Focus on Business Value…4
Examples of Creating Business Value…6
Building the Business Case…8
Tracking and Communicating the Value…9
Conclusions…10