In this session, Ian Isaac and his colleagues from aigdirect.com described how they use ILOG BRMS and a Service Oriented Architecure to ease the process of integrating mergers and acquisitions into their IT infrastructure.

In the insurance industry, mergers and acquisitions often leave companies with multiple systems for billing, claims and policy administration that tend to fragment processing and impede growth and change management.

ILOG BRMS’s enabled aigdirect.com to face this challenge with agility and transparency while meeting their corporate quality control requirements.

The team took questions from the audience and shared their best practices and lessons learned when leveraging BRMS and SOA across the enterprise, as well as some of the benefits and milestones already achieved.

My major takeaway from this session was when the team explained the significant resistance they had initially encountered from the business side to the BRMS approach. People were concerned that the automated system would have an adverse affect on customer service unless all automated decisions and processes were manually reviewed. This resistance to change was quite understandable. These people own the business process and needed to see clear proof that the BRMS solution was effective and reliable before putting their trust in it. They quickly discovered, however, that the BRMS system actually helped them enormously to improve customer service and provide a faster, more consistent service.