Youve just been called into conference with your CEO. Your NameHere, he says, I just came from a board meeting and Johnson fromAdvanced Financial says his IT guys are using XML for everything,and theyve improved their efficiency by 400 percent. When are wegoing to get with this XML thing and improve our efficiency? I wanta full report by Friday!
Sound familiar? These are the same guys who were demanding that wehad to have everything Web based right after their kids told themto sign up for AOL. SureI have a 50 year old flat-file databasethat was originally designed for sequential access on magnetic tapeand I need to have a plan to XMLize it by next week. While Im atit, I might as well design an XML-based STP (straight throughprocessing) system.

Dont Believe the Hype
Everywhere we look these days we see that now familiar acronym,XML. Two years ago on these pages I warned about the over-hyping ofXML: It is not the panacea that will solve all of your dataprocessing woes. It makes no sense to mindlessly demand that we useXML in every system. On the other hand, it really is ubiquitous andshould not be ignored. Your latest browser supports XML, MicrosoftOffice is XML-enabled. I have seen many applications that use XMLfiles the way we used to use text-based INI files.
A recent report by ZapThink (www.zapthink.com) states thatexpenditures on XML technologies in the financial services sectorwill grow to over $8.3 billion by 2005. Is the insurance industryreally going to spend billions on XML? I dont know, but I do knowthat we are putting the cart before the horse. Lets build andpurchase systems that efficiently integrate with our existingsystems. Lets make those decisions based on a wide range ofcriteria, not just on their use of XML.

Believe the Hype
That being said, XML is very, very useful. It will not go away. Itshouldnt go away. Our industry will benefit by using XML in twoprimary arenas: streamlining data acquisition and transfer, andcontent management and publishing. And thats a pretty good trickfor one standard.
So what do you tell your CEO about XML? The World Wide WebConsortium (www.w3c.org)theorganization that defines standards for most Web-basedthingsdefines XML thus: The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is theuniversal format for structured documents and data on the Web. Gee,thats useful. More succinctly, XML is a tagged meta-language.Meta-language means there is additional information provided aboutthe data thatare represented in a document. Thatadditionalinformationmetadatais included in the tags.
Everyones familiar with HTML. The tags in HTML adhere to a set ofstandard meanings (also defined by the W3C). So this:
<B><I>XML is Cool</I></B>
will be correctly interpreted by any Web browser, which willrendered the text as bold and italicized. In XML, on the otherhand, I might have something like:
<subhead>XML is Cool</subhead>
By itself, this statement is meaningless as far as data processingis concerned. Interesting enough, it probably has some meaning tomost human readersi.e., the phrase XML is cool is intended to be asubhead in some document.
But if we include the above phrase in a XML document that also hasa reference to a DTD (document type definition), it will make senseto our data processing system. The DTD will identify subhead as avalid element and will specify what type of data constitutes asubhead.
With this information, our system can then do something meaningfulwith the phrase. If its a publishing system, it may apply a stylesheet to the subhead and render it as bold and italicized. If its adata system, it may insert whatevers between the tags into aspecific field in a database. Thats what put the XextensibleinXML.
Because there are no hard and fast rules regarding the meaning oftags in any particular XML document, those tags can be customizedby industry (e.g., ChemXML), company (PruXML), or even individual(PaulXML), and used in a variety of ways depending on the DTD andthe system that is interpreting that data.
HTML is restricted to describing the presentation of data (bold, 12point, etc.); it does so by pre-determined, universal rules. ButXML describes the data itself, and its up to the system todetermine how to use that data.
Single-Source Publishing
We all have tons of documents that we need to share throughout ourorganizations. Some of these are updated constantly, and some areset in stone and only change when we undergo a corporatereorganization. Traditionally, policy manuals have been distributedusing loose-leaf binders so supplements can be sent out whenneeded.
We all have a need for central document control and management. Thecorporate intranet has become the preferred method for distributingdocuments throughout the organization. A single file, located on acentral server, is updated so everyone who needs that document hasaccess to the latest approved version. For documents with extensiveformatting and graphics, Adobe PDFs are currently the standard, butother documents are often provided in a wide variety of styles andformatsASCII text, Microsoft Word (pick a version),comma-delimited, and so on. It makes sense to have a standarddocument format that could be used for publishing across theenterprise. This is where XML fits the bill.
At The National Underwriter Company, we have daily instantaneousnews updates available on the Web sites for our weeklynewsmagazines (www.nationalunderwriter.com).These are known as our hot news. They are created by editorialstaff in Hoboken, N.J., using a simple Web interface and deliveredto a server in our Cincinnati office. The format they are saved inis XML.
These documents are then immediately available for our onlinecustomers with the XML rendered into HTMLthe formatting isdetermined by a style sheet. So, for example, the XML would saythat a particular phrase is a headline, and the Web style sheetwould convert any headline into 14-point bold Arial for display onthe Web. If it was going to be printed, our desktop publishingsoftware might convert headlines into 14-point bold AdobeHelvetica.
The idea is that different style sheets can be applied to these XMLdocuments to format them for different audiences or differentbrowsers or even for printing; for example, theyre automaticallytransformed into daily news update e-mails. Because we are using asimple and extensible format for our data we are able to use it inmany different ways.
Every organization can benefit from using similar technologies forin-house publishing. Simple scripts can be written to convertvirtually any electronic document to XML. A standard DTD or schema(an XML schema is another way of describing an XML documentstructure) can be used to identify data types that can then bedelivered on demand; the formatting is provided by style sheetsdesigned for the particular end useHTML, QuarkXPress, etc. Storageand organization of documents is also facilitated by having them ina standard format. Most commercial and home-grown documentmanagement systems make extensive use of XML.

Its The Data, Stupid
Maybe you really dont care about single-source publishing. But youdo care about your data: your customer data, your policy data, yourfinancial data, and your historical data. Insurance companies havealways been massive consumers and producers of data.
As producers of data, we have always strived to implement systemsthat eliminate as much of the human touch as possible. (Not that wedont like people, but that people make misteaks.) SEMCI issomething worth striving for. Even if we arent concerned with themultiple company part of SEMCI, we are concerned with reducing anyduplication of identical data entry. Ideally, a field agent willcollect customer data which will be entered into a system once, andthat data will then flow through the agency software to the companysoftware and into our master database, all without any manualre-entry.
I am not suggesting that you strive to adopt an existing standardfor your data transactions or that you rush to develop your own. Ido, however, believe that we will all have XML in our futures. Anyof the various Web services models in existence will rely on XMLfor both configuration and data transfer. Most off the shelfsolutions rely on XML in one form or another. Assure your CEO thatyou are, in fact, using XML now and will use it in the future, butonly where you can see a clear benefit. Bandwagons are for bands,not IT professionals.

Whose XML?

We have traditionally used various EDI schemes formainframe-to-mainframe data transfer. EDI consists of a defineddata structure that identifies what those data are by their placein a bit stream. Its much more efficient to define data types usingan XML DTD and then build an XML document based on that DTD. Theresultant document (ASCII text or unidata) can then by encrypted,compressed, transformed, and transmitted from system to systemusing virtually any medium including the Internet. We could spendmonths analyzing our data and create a schema custom designed forour existing systems. Or we could look around and see what hasalready been developed.
The ACORD Life XML standards are the result of work done earlier onwith the OLifE standard. (OLifE was a standard that used MicrosoftCOM software to define data transactions between client and serverapplications.) When XML emerged as a new technology, the frameworkwas already in place to transfer the OLifE data model to XML.XMLife defines a complete data model for a straight throughprocessing system. Systems are now in production that use XMLifefor processing from the agents laptops to the corporatemainframes.
ACORD also has an XML standard for P&C transactions thataddresses the real-time requirement by defining P&Ctransactions that include both request and response messages forpersonal lines, commercial lines, surety, claims, and accountingtransactions. Version 1.0.0 of the ACORD PC XML standard has beenin use since July 2001.
There are other XML standards available: ebXML is an internationalstandard designed to let all types of companies conduct businessusing the Internet. Its a joint initiative of UN/CEFACT (www.unece .org/cefact) and OASIS (www.oasis-open.org). The StraightThrough Processing Markup Language (STPML) is an XML messagespecification designed for the financial securities tradingindustry to meet the requirements of straight through processing.The International Standard ISO 15022 (www.iso15022 .org) is designed forstandard messaging for banking, securities and related financialservices. There exist a plethora of XML based standards for theacronym lover. PR