Insurer Rebuilds, Rethinks, RenewsInsurer Rebuilds, Rethinks, Renews

But the going will be smoother for Arch, having built an architecture free from the complexities many insurance systems face and designed anticipating the need to be flexible. That flexibility was demonstrated during the Aug. 14 blackout that struck the Midwest and the Northeast. The carrier counts on three databases: one in Minnesota provided by Insurity, one on the West Coast provided by ePolicy, and Arch's Data Place, which runs in an IBM data center on the East Coast. "Simply because we could get a guy to the Internet someplace, we could control our whole infrastructure and have all our applications available across the network without a hitch," Brodie says.

The day-to-day business value of that flexibility is that "virtually everything is accessible over the Web, [so] we literally can open an office overnight," Brodie says. "The ability to let four guys go to Houston, rent space, and be up and running virtually immediately lets us be very responsive."

On the application side, the Data Place-centered design, surrounded by large chunks of purchased functionality, allows the deployment of "quick-hit" applications, Brodie says, "but in a way that's scalable and provides a unified space to the business users, allowing business applications to evolve very quickly."

Another crucial element is the user view, powered by Cognos Inc., Brodie says. "In the old days when you did a big MIS project, you spent months or years working with all the business constituencies," he explains. Since this technology contains the data in one cohesive place, architectural integrity is built into data definitions around time and organization, etc., "making the creation of end-user reports an easy thing to do on the fly," Brodie says. "It provides an incredibly flexible MIS platform going forward."