Recently I received an e-mail invite to a webinar, "SOA & the Insurance Industry: Voice of the Experts." The event was organized by InfoWorld, and included speakers from the TowerGroup, BEA, and Zurich Financial Services. Naturally, my interest was aroused.

I watched the webinar, and there was a lot of good information. I noticed there was someone missing from the discussion. I have been working in the insurance industry for twenty-two years, and the biggest challenge has been involving business users. We do not hear enough from the business user.

If you do a search for SOA and insurance on the web, you will find plenty of articles and presentations by information technology people. You will be hard-pressed to find anything by the business user. A ‘mid office’ administration system is the heart of an insurance company. It is much more than connecting some services or being a presence on the web. It is the embodiment of a set of business rules,  processes and a repository of information vital to the running of an insurance company.

Surely a significant contributing factor to a successful SOA project is the connection between business users and information technology users, not the way the services are connected.