OLE for Life Insurance Aims at Integration

Joe Long
Technical Evangelist, Developer Relations Group

The insurance industry can be divided into three main categories: life, health, and property and casualty. In the property and casualty industry, a number of vendors provide solutions that completely automate the agency. Life insurance, however, has no true counterpart to these systems, so life insurance firms must purchase solutions from multiple vendors, and then pay the vendors or consultants to integrate the applications.

This usually means modifying the applications to share information using a flat file transfer. This "one off" consulting is expensive, so life insurance companies typically don't buy a lot of software, nor do they upgrade existing software much. Integration is also minimal—each application typically has its own database and data entry screens. It is unusual, without manual intervention, to have changes in one database reflected in another.

OLE for Life Insurance is designed to be a first step toward integrating these systems. OLE for Life Insurance is being created by an industry group called Solutions for Life Insurance Enterprise Computing (SLIEC), which consists of Microsoft, Andersen Consulting, FDP, E-Z Data, Lincoln National, and Sterling Wentworth.

OLE for Life Insurance is a protocol for an OLE control. Like WOSA/XRT (see "OLE for Real-Time Market Data Resources"), OLE for Life Insurance defines no new interfaces. Instead, it relies on OLE Automation, uniform data transfer, and OLE events.

It works by providing an OLE interface (using OLE Automation collections) to a common logical database to store "common" information. This information initially pertains to clients or customers; for example, addresses, telephone numbers, or risks such as skydiving, race-car driving, smoking, and so on.

A typical application that is written to use OLE for Life Insurance will use OLE Automation to get access to this common data. The OLE control keeps a pointer to the object in the running object table, which is a list of globally available objects, so that each application that accesses data uses the same object.

This enables the object to "watch" what information is being accessed, modified, or deleted. Each application that is using the OLE control is notified of any change to the data. Using this allows applications to obtain all important information pertinent to a particular client, such as whether a different application is currently working on that client's record. In other words, by using the running object table, interapplication communication becomes an integral part of the architecture.

Joe Long is the technical evangelist in Microsoft's Developer Relations Group responsible for financial services and insurance.