| RJ Wallace
Implements "continuous" EAI strategy
RJ Wallace and Others, the non-marine, liability division of Lloyd's of London underwriter LIMIT (London Insurance Market Investment Trust), has had to cope with a prolonged period of change. The company is the product of several mergers in a turbulent financial market where advancing information technology is constantly shifting the goalposts.
Fast and effective systems integration - both for post-merger business consolidation and to meet the demands of its broker customers - is, therefore, high on RJ Wallace's IT agenda. Working with Transoft, its long-term IT services supplier, RJ Wallace has built a framework to cope with what might be called "continuous" enterprise application integration (EAI).
Jim Davis, Divisional Director of Information Systems for RJ Wallace and Others, explains: "Lloyd's is an area of the market that has gone through a lot of consolidation - and there have been changes from the introduction of corporate capital as well as names capital. This means we are faced with merging operational units and even whole businesses with a wide range of IT. We recently merged three syndicates, for example, and each one came with different IT systems."
There were three possible solutions to integration problems - buy a new system, build one, or "sew the existing systems together". With the help of Transoft, RJ Wallace adopted the latter strategy. It was not initially viewed as an EAI project, however. At first, RJ Wallace wanted a way to preserve its investment in its legacy applications. In 1994, the company decided to migrate its applications from a proprietary Data General minicomputer to a Unix-based platform. The company wanted to keep its tried and tested business applications rather than re-write them for the new environment, and chose Transoft's code migration tools to convert its Data General-based COBOL programs to Micro Focus Cobol under Data General DG/UX Unix.
Through the 1990s, mergers and organizational changes meant more integration was required and there was a recognition that the company needed a stable platform for future development to support its business plans. "The goal is to bring the front-end IT applications together so we can deliver a better service to our brokers," says Mr Davis. "When we brought the three syndicates together, for example, we had three different ways to prepare the policies. Obviously we had to integrate them."
The Transoft Component Adapters (TCA) allowed the different application systems to communicate with each other and, more importantly from RJ Wallace's point of view, it allowed controlled, step-by-step integration.
Mr Davis sees such a long-term strategy for integration as essential - but it must be able to accommodate short-term demands from the business: "All companies need a strategy and a technology framework for EAI. Although we did not set out to cope with all the mergers and re-organization, we had the tools that enabled us to do the necessary re-engineering. But right at the start we knew we wanted something which could meet our short-term needs within the context of a long-term plan. TCA lets us integrate new systems with our legacy applications as we need them."
"Our IT strategy is an overall part of our business strategy rather than a core aspect of our business development. Due to the cyclic nature of our business, there is never a good time to install a new IT system. We have a mass of historical data that must remain on the system.
Theoretically, we could receive a claim tomorrow on a 25-year-old policy. We require reliable, open applications, that are easily integrated."
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Computer Software Group Limited 2007 |
