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American Modern Insurance Group Inc.
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March 13, 2006 (Computerworld) --
American Modern Insurance Group Inc.
www.amig.com
- Business: American Modern Insurance Group is a subsidiary of The Midland Co. Amelia, Ohio-based Midland had revenue of $733 million in 2005.
- IT department: 163 employees
- Project champion: Patrick Law
- Project payback: The homegrown casualty policy administration system will be retired by year's end. Law reports that the first phase of the project has already paid for itself.
When American Modern Insurance Group Inc. decided that its systems weren't keeping pace with its changing needs, Vice President of Infrastructure Patrick Law and his IT staff jumped in with both feet. They replaced mainframes, databases, the company's core business application and all associated infrastructure in one ongoing, $62 million project -- building the whole package atop a service-oriented architecture to boot. Law acknowledges that along the way, he's learned some hard lessons about being in the SOA vanguard.
Amelia, Ohio-based American Modern is replacing two aging Unisys ClearPath mainframes with a single IBM zSeries mainframe, and it's moving from Unisys and Oracle databases to IBM's DB2. The big-picture goal, set to be accomplished by the end of this year, is the retirement of the insurer's homegrown casualty policy administration system -- 30 years old and developed in Unisys Cobol -- with Huon, an application for the insurance industry from U.K-based The Innovation Group PLC (TIG). Retirement of the property line will follow.
Technologically speaking, the project's integration and transition demands are an alphabet soup: IBM's MQSeries, the CICS Transaction Gateway, WebSphere Business Integration Server, the Java Database Connectivity API (to facilitate integration between J2EE components on AIX) and so on. "Not only is this project technically challenging," says Law, possibly understating the case, "it also has a lot of risks that make project management extremely difficult."
Perhaps the most difficult, and impressive, aspect of American Modern's undertaking is the company's determination to shift to an SOA. "Since SOA on the mainframe is still in its infancy, there are many technical issues, such as design approach and interface, to address," Law says. For example, he calls Huon "a 20-year-old monolithic CICS application" and says adapting it to a service-based system has been one of his major challenges, although TIG has done a good
job in redesigning Huon so that it will work well under an SOA framework. "The effort of turning monolithic Cobol modules to functional components and offering them to the Java-based middle tier as services is almost completed," Law adds.
Question of Ownership
According to Dennis Gaughan, an analyst at AMR Research Inc., technical challenges are only part of the picture for early SOA adopters like American Modern. "We hear about a lot of issues with accountability and governance," he says. The ownership of traditional applications, defined by functional areas, such as manufacturing or underwriting (depending on industry), are clearly defined.
With the tectonic shift to SOA, "companies find themselves constructing new processes by taking pieces from various applications," Gaughan adds. "As a result, you see a lot of questions around who owns these composite apps." A key element of SOA success, he says, is having a crystal-clear understanding of governance, accountability and service-level expectations.
Law acknowledges that American Modern has plenty to learn about the governance side of SOA, having thus far focused the bulk of its attention first on justifying the cost of the ambitious project and then on the technology.
Although justifiably proud of the project, Law doesn't deny that there have been bumps and bruises along the way. Training and personnel expenses were one unpleasant surprise. For example, early on, American Modern developed a case of sticker shock when the company needed a consultant to work with middleware from the former CrossWorlds Software Inc., which was purchased by IBM. "We actually wound up developing our own expert in-house," he says.
And when it comes to SOAs, Law adds, "there's a lot of talk out there, but not a lot of true plug-and-play products or standards." The big lesson, he says: "If you really want to do it, you're on your own."
Ulfelder is a freelance writer in Southboro, Mass. Contact him at steve@ulfelder.com.
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