Wolfgang Keller Generali, Wien (Austria)

Wolfgang Keller is currently a manager of reusable software components (Plattform Manager) for Generali Office Service & Consulting AG in Vienna, Austria. His responsibilities include the technical base for Generali's Phoenix line of insurance applications, technical and domain architecture and international project coordination for Generali's distributed development in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. Before that, he worked as a senior software architect and project manager for sd&m, a Munich based consulting firm. He was a member of VAAs architecture team from 1995 to 1997. VAA is a public domain insurance reference model initiated by GDV, the German Insurance Association . Mister Keller holds a Diplom (M.S. degree) in computer science from Technical University of Munich, Germany.

Tutorial: How to Build Flexible Insurance Systems

Challenges

Much has been written about new business challenges for the financial enterprise at the beginning of the next century. Some influences are deregulation of financial and insurance markets, global competition, rating agencies that bring more transparency to markets, customers who do no longer want mass products but want products tailored to their needs and a lot of other developments that make writing software for the financial market a very challenging task. Increased cost pressure, competition, and customer expectations lead to an increased demand in software that can handle more financial products, tailored to individual customer faster and cheaper via whatever sales channel the customer prefers.

Financial enterprises who are good at providing and operating software systems that can handle these demands have a serious strategic advantage. In order to act flexible on the markets, the financial enterprise needs very flexible software systems. This flexibility comprises various kinds of flexibility that need to be addressed, like point Of service (POS) flexibility, product flexibility, business process flexibility, technical flexibility and heterogeneity:

The above aspects have not been covered sufficiently by object technology alone. Assembling a system from components also does not lead automatically to some satisfactory solution for the above challenges.

Instead, we need to combine technologies from the fields of component technology, object technology, meta-systems technology, open implementation technology plus architectural and domain knowledge from existing financial applications in order to tackle the above tasks.

Contents of the Tutorial

The tutorial will start by giving you an overview of the challenges and design forces that you will face, when building a large scale flexible insurance system.

We will then present proven solutions for many of the problems in pattern form.

There's also a whole history of approaches that were tried in the past and failed. We will also present these pitfalls of flexible systems.

The tutorial will also touch aspects like product modeling, managing large heterogeneous application portfolios and dealing with rapid technical change.