There is plenty of useful information on acarriers legacy systems, but getting to it can present a formidablechallenge to an IT department. For the Indiana Farm Bureau (IFB),its legacy systems were aging, inflexible, and sometimes it wasdifficult to get the information our customers wanted, says GoutamKundu, director of corporate technology at IFB. Still, the carrierwas not ready to walk away from its legacy system. Rather, IFBwanted to extend its systems by integrating its components into onebrowser-based system, according to Kundu.

While the old systems were good for answering product-basedquestions, inquiries about billing or other business functionscreated a challenge for the IT staff at IFB. Some of the businessdemands werent fulfilled by the current workflows in these systems,says Kundu. The systems were very cryptic, and they were very codeintensive.

When new agencies were opened, training on the old systems wasquite extensive. It was a week-long project and involved a lot ofhand holding, he says. There also was the [possibility] of having alot of mistakes. One small error code or one wrong keystroke couldlead to inaccurate code.

A major overhaul of the legacy systemswhether to rearchitect orredesign themwill take some time that IFB cant spare, according toKundu. While we are going through this labor-intensive,time-consuming strategy, we wanted to produce some quick results,he says. IFB considered adopting screen-scraping technology as oneoption but instead turned to systems provider Jacada, asking thevendor to build a prototype so a proof of concept could beconducted. We wanted to identify business transactions that werehigh pain points among our agents and CSRs, says Kundu. At the sametime, we wanted to have something that was easy to create. That wasa fine line.

Indiana Farm Bureau decided to experiment with this technologyon its life line of business. By working with its life andmarketing business units, IFB identified its most frequently usedlife system transactions. Information from the differenttransactions was then combined onto a couple of browser-basedfront-end screens. Jacadas Interface Server product offered aJava-based solution, which Kundu believes, helped make the solutionwork so well.

IFB began the search for a solution in the third quarter of2002. We took a very conservative approach to production andimplementation, says Kundu. That was the most time-consumingsegment of this whole project. During the time between theestablishment of the proof of concept and the rollout, which tookplace in the first quarter of this year, the focus was on making ita seamless rollout. Its a thin-client solution, so theimplementation isnt rocket science, but it was a cultural changefor our agents and CSRs, says Kundu. We wanted to make sure theyfound it to be intuitive. We wanted them to get used to it and giveus some feedback. The training was more on the workflow than thetechnology. Basically [users] have nothing but good things tosay.

Kundu stresses the Jacada system is no miracle worker. Jacadacan do only so much with our existing systems, he says. If thefeature isnt present in our source system, Jacada is not going tobe able to build that functionality.

IFB already had enough legacy systems, so it wanted the Jacadasystem to sit on top of the legacy transactions rather than be asystem on its own. We did not create too much business logic inthis layer, says Kundu. We used the existing business logic in thelegacy applications. That was the fine line between a short-termsolution and a long-term solution.
Although he did not reveal costs, Kundu believes the fact that thiswas an inexpensive solution caused IFB to seize the opportunity todo something quickly instead of long term. It was low risk, hesays. We did not change code or interfaces. It was low cost andquick to produce results. ROBERT REGIS HYLE

CaseFile
The Problem: Carrier needed a
quick solution to its legacy integration problems.

THE COMPANY: Indiana Farm Bureau
WEB SITE: www.infarmbureau.com
Net Written Premium: $1 billion

THE SOLUTION: Jacada Interface Server
WEB SITE: www.jacada.com