CHAPTER 14

Case Study – Service-Based Integration in Insurance

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

– Arthur Ashe

SOA has defined a new approach to the design and implementation of enterprise IT systems. But using SOA does not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean that you should abandon the existing applications that are the backbone of today’s enterprises or the best integration approaches developed over the last 15–20 years. Furthermore, SOA does not mean automatically and blindly turning everything into a service. It means defining and implementing enterprise business services to support the primary enterprise capabilities. When it comes to implementing these services using existing enterprise applications, integration approaches can vary widely. There is no hard and fast rule that all integration has to be implemented as services. On the contrary, each specific integration scenario has to be analyzed carefully and an appropriate implementation chosen, based on the requirements of the higher-level business services.

This chapter provides an example that demonstrates the implementation of service-based integration in the insurance industry. It illustrates the approaches defined in Chapter 10 as applied to a fictitious insurance company — ACME Insurance — and its current IT applications. Then, it illustrates the implementation of enterprise services, focusing on the integration architecture aspects of the implementation. Although the example in this chapter ...

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