ACORD Receives Technology Donations
Las Vegas — ACORD’s information model and insurance capability models received a boost this week with the announcement of donations from two technology solutions and services providers.
The Pearl River, N.Y., nonprofit insurance standards organization made the announcements at its ACORD/LOMA Insurance Systems Forum conference in Las Vegas this week. ACORD accepts intellectual property contributions from member companies on behalf of the industry, and integrates them through the standards development process to further enhance and expand ACORD standards.
Paris-based Prima Solutions will contribute its insurance information model to ACORD, which, says the organization, will support ACORD’s own information model. Prima’s information model is the result of years of research and development from their insurance and object technology specialists. The information model is part of Prima Solutions’ Insurance Business Component Suite (Prima IBCS), and represents an enterprisewide data semantic of insurance information.
"This contribution will accelerate the development of the ACORD Information Model, which is a major facet of the ACORD Standards Framework,” said Gregory Maciag, president and CEO of ACORD. “The ACORD Information Model represents standards data from all aspects of the insurance industry including property, casualty, surety, life, annuities, health, reinsurance and large commercial. Prima Solution’s contribution to this development is enormously valuable."
Through this contribution, ACORD will more rapidly develop its framework, and the Prima information model will enable ACORD to reach its goal of more consistent and traceable standards throughout the development process, across all business lines and all geographic boundaries.
"Prima Solutions believes that both technology and industry-specific standards are essential if clients are to solve their collaboration and integration problems and accelerate their business strategies—whether they are to run, grow or transform their businesses," said Hugues Delannoy, president and CEO of Prima Solutions.
"The linkage of process, components, forms and data around a standard Information Model is a key challenge to both ACORD and to our entire industry, which faces the need to redesign and modernize their IT environment in a consistent manner across their business lines and geographies," said John Kellington, SVP, ACORD. "This contribution by Prima Solutions demonstrates its commitment to industry standards, and to the standards development community in which it operates. It will create a value proposition for the industry that will enable and support industry transformation for growth and survival, as well as promote innovative business solutions in a manner that is technology neutral."
Going forward, Prima Solutions will work closely with ACORD and its various committees to integrate the reference model content into the existing ACORD standards. ACORD will issue implementation guides and other tools to assist the insurance industry in the adoption, expansion and customization of the Information Model.
In related news, New York-based Deloitte LLP donated capabilities, processes and metrics designed to enhance ACORD’s Insurance Capability Model. The ACORD Capability Model describes what a company does. Capabilities include such things as channel strategy or developing channel interactivity. By creating standard definitions for these common capabilities, companies more easily develop functions and assess their structures against an industry standard. This can help companies improve processing and make them more competitive.
The donated content consists of 49 capabilities, 123 processes and seven new business metrics for annuities taken from Deloitte’s industry leading ACES annuity benchmarking study.
Process "maps" provide companies with standard names and definitions of business processes, which can be linked to design business flows. Examples of such processes include “create strategy” and “develop channel interactivity.”
Metrics allow companies to benchmark their performance against the industry. Examples include "Average Number of Contracts Written" and "Issued Contracts as a Percent of Written Contracts."
"The Standards Framework Capability Model represents the foundation for understanding and helping member companies more easily compare their organizations against an industry standard," said Kellington. "This generous donation by Deloitte will further enhance our current model once it’s integrated into the Standards Framework Capability Model, making the end product more robust helping us reach our objective more quickly."
The capabilities, processes and metrics will be integrated into the current Capability Model, with the assistance of Deloitte, as part of ACORD’s normal standards setting process.
Source: ACORD
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