LEGACY SYSTEM INTEGRATION

There is plenty of useful information on a carriers legacy systems, but getting to it can present a formidable challenge to an IT department. For the Indiana Farm Bureau (IFB), its legacy systems were aging, inflexible, and sometimes it was difficult to get the information our customers wanted, says Goutam Kundu, director of corporate technology at IFB. Still, the carrier was not ready to walk away from its legacy system. Rather, IFB wanted to extend its systems by integrating its components into one browser-based system, according to Kundu.

While the old systems were good for answering product-based questions, inquiries about billing or other business functions created a challenge for the IT staff at IFB. Some of the business demands werent fulfilled by the current workflows in these systems, says Kundu. The systems were very cryptic, and they were very code intensive.

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

A major overhaul of the legacy systemswhether to rearchitect or redesign themwill take some time that IFB cant spare, according to Kundu. 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 one option but instead turned to systems provider Jacada, asking the vendor to build a prototype so a proof of concept could be conducted. We wanted to identify business transactions that were high pain points among our agents and CSRs, says Kundu. At the same time, we wanted to have something that was easy to create. That was a fine line.

Indiana Farm Bureau decided to experiment with this technology on its life line of business. By working with its life and marketing business units, IFB identified its most frequently used life system transactions. Information from the different transactions was then combined onto a couple of browser-based front-end screens. Jacadas Interface Server product offered a Java-based solution, which Kundu believes, helped make the solution work so well.

IFB began the search for a solution in the third quarter of 2002. We took a very conservative approach to production and implementation, says Kundu. That was the most time-consuming segment of this whole project. During the time between the establishment of the proof of concept and the rollout, which took place in the first quarter of this year, the focus was on making it a seamless rollout. Its a thin-client solution, so the implementation isnt rocket science, but it was a cultural change for our agents and CSRs, says Kundu. We wanted to make sure they found it to be intuitive. We wanted them to get used to it and give us some feedback. The training was more on the workflow than the technology. Basically [users] have nothing but good things to say.

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

IFB already had enough legacy systems, so it wanted the Jacada system to sit on top of the legacy transactions rather than be a system on its own. We did not create too much business logic in this layer, says Kundu. We used the existing business logic in the legacy applications. That was the fine line between a short-term solution and a long-term solution.
Although he did not reveal costs, Kundu believes the fact that this was an inexpensive solution caused IFB to seize the opportunity to do something quickly instead of long term. It was low risk, he says. We did not change code or interfaces. It was low cost and quick 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