IBM announced two new advances in the insurance industry--asolution for improving operational efficiency and a framework forprocess acceleration--that are designed to help insurance carrierslower costs and increase customer satisfaction by handling coreprocesses, such as claims and policy processing, moreefficiently.

IBM's new Insurance Operations of the Future (IOF) solution ispowered by a service-oriented architecture (SOA) built on IBMsoftware. The IOF Solution recognizes inbound work tasks, includingthose coming from unstructured sources such as paper mail,voicemail, e-mail, and the Web. The solution can extract therelevant information, enrich it, and route the work task to anautomated process, a clerical process, or a specialist processpath.

The foundation of IOF is the new IBM Insurance ProcessAcceleration (IPA) Framework, which includes elements from IBM'sWebSphere, Information Management, Lotus, Rational and Tivoliportfolios. The framework provides the SOA infrastructure requiredto enable solutions like IOF target processes like claimsmanagement, policy administration, underwriting, new businessprocessing, and self-service inquiry and payment.

Based on open standards, IBM's framework strategy enablesclients to take advantage of their existing capabilities along withnew packaged software applications and customized capabilities.IBM's independent software vendor system also enables softwareproviders to participate in the framework, giving insuranceproviders flexibility in choosing the business applications theyneed to address specific business processes and challenges.

"Insurance companies are still very dependent on paper documentsand other forms of unstructured data to support basic processessuch as contact center inquiries, policy processing, claimspayments, underwriting and other service requests," says MarkLewis, general manager, global insurance industry for IBM. "The IOFSolution allows insurance companies to dramatically cut costs andbetter respond to the growing needs of customers, agents andregulators while the IPA Framework provides an agile base forfuture insurance applications and solutions. These advances providea glimpse of what the future of the insurance industry will looklike."