During the ACORD insurance conference in May, Insurity, a ChoicePoint company, announced a multi-year strategic alliance with Microsoft that would combine Insurity’s industry expertise with Microsoft’s .NET platform architecture and the Windows Server System.

“A software product for insurance is never complete. We always evolve with the needs of the market and our customers. The time-to-market for enhancements has been dramatically decreased.”

WFS asked the Insurity development team to describe its progress in deploying its applications on the Microsoft platform. Below are the team’s responses, submitted jointly by Chris Kinkade, Insurity’s lead technology architect, and  Mike Jensen, Insurity senior systems consultant. Both are members of Insurity’s Technology Architecture Review Board. The Microsoft perspective was supplied by Charles Fitcher, group manager, developer platform evangelists at Microsoft.

 What are you developing?

Insurity’s Insurance Decisions suite of products serves the needs of the property casualty insurance industry. The underlying framework for most of its applications, including Policy Decisions, Claims Decisions and Reporting Decisions is a Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0-based code base. This architecture, the result of a 125-person-year effort, is remarkably extensible and reusable and decreases total cost of ownership for Insurity and its customers.

 What Microsoft tools are you using?

Insurity looked at several options for IDEs (integrated development environments), databases and tools before we finally chose Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, SSIS, SSAS and soon-to-be Office 2007 as part of the core architecture. Extensions to the SharePoint portal server are also built into the framework.

“A software product for insurance is never complete. We always evolve with the needs of the market and our customers. The time-to-market for enhancements has been dramatically decreased.”
 How is it going?

As Insurity creates new applications, a core group of architects is held accountable for bringing the new applications under the fold of the framework. Our diligence in making sure that the underlying concepts are well thought out, use the best tools available in the market and are easily understandable by new developers and architects has really paid off. We’ve literally had no major issues bringing new products to market, and it has been a great experience learning and creating products based on the latest Microsoft technology.

 Ease of development?

The IDE makes or breaks developer productivity. When Insurity developed its first-generation Internet product, we developed a proprietary IDE along with Microsoft Visual Studio 2003. With the switch to the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, we’ve also switched IDEs to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. The difference has been remarkable. For example, the Edit & Continue feature in the framework now enables our team to make changes to code and continue testing without recompiling. Microsoft has listened to its customers and developers to include this change. Our productivity has increased, and with changes like this, our ability to serve our customers has also increased.

 How was the learning curve?

Every new product and technology has its own learning curve. Insurity took several steps to minimize this. For one, we believe in very strong documentation. Second, we have internal training classes for developers. Third, we have a very simple, tiered architecture for the product framework. Lastly, human capital development is a key focus of senior management. Insurity’s legacy developers have made the switch with the assistance of Microsoft classes on Visual Basic .NET, external trainers and internal mentors. In the end, the learning curve was minimal.

 Where are you turning with questions – MSDN, books, etc?

MSDN has been a phenomenal resource. Our product is cutting edge and so we often have to blaze new trails. For example, we built a dynamic screen utility to enable underwriting workflow. We built integration with Office 2007 to enable reserve worksheets and form letters to be built on the server side instead of the client side, creating the ability to upgrade faster instead of depending on client versions. These kinds of initiatives required additional expertise, and we got our answers from multiple sources.

For the bulk of our questions that require immediate attention, MSDN, our relationship with Microsoft, our membership in the Insurance Value Chain program and our customer support levels with Microsoft have made the difference between productivity and frustration.

In fact, we use newsgroups for many of our questions that don’t need immediate attention. With the advent of Microsoft .NET newsgroups that are monitored and supported by Microsoft’s staff, our team feels that Microsoft has taken a critical step in surpassing the group effort gains of open source, while simultaneously delivering great innovation.

 How is time to completion compared to other development environments?

A software product for insurance is never complete. We always evolve with the needs of the market and our customers. The time-to-market for enhancements has been dramatically decreased by use of our common framework and Microsoft tools. Insurity does have non-Microsoft development platforms within its portfolio, but the experience with Microsoft tools and assets has been far superior, and we are very proud of our ability to churn out new applications rapidly and solve industry issues effectively.

 What will you tackle next?

We see a lot of carriers investing in special, but one-off, systems to process specialty lines of business. We think we can add value there to create efficiency. We see adjustors switch between applications to enter the same data multiple times. We are working to eliminate this kind of inefficiency. We see need for additional analytical tools for critical business intelligence. There’s really no end to the ways we can help support our clients.

 What lessons can you pass on to others?

There are a few good lessons to take back from this great experience. Most importantly, we are all in the people business, not software/services/product business. Having a motivated workforce that is well trained, highly skilled and ready to learn new things is paramount. In addition, businesses cannot be complacent and ignore new, more flexible tools in the market. Microsoft has made tremendous inroads in this area.  And Microsoft’s Web services platform gives the greatest gift of all – you don’t have to solve your legacy application problem in one fell swoop. You can use tools to link your legacy applications to new applications or components.

 Charles, from Microsoft’s perspective, what has the experience been like?

Our engagement with Insurity has surpassed our best expectations to date. The zeal for adoption of Microsoft technologies in every corner of the company’s offerings really overwhelmed our team initially. We actually had to allocate more resource time to meet all the broad technology adoption architecture assist requests. It was a welcome problem to have when working with our ISV partners. The capabilities in the Microsoft platform enabled Insurity development teams to meet an aggressive ship schedule, and we are on track with exciting Insurity product offerings. We are delighted.

www.insurity.com