From Process to Data through Services Ric Gingell Chief Architect Amarta Thursday September 1 st, 2005 VLDB 2005 Trondheim

Life and Pensions  Life insurance  Long term savings  Policies are long-term contracts - decades  Now an essential part of the social responsibility

Life and Pension Policy Administration  Well established  Fairly common processes  A few specialised areas  Well suited to automation  Well suited to batch processes

Business Process Business Processes Manual Task Automatic Task Manual Task Business Rules Procedure

New Business Process

Start Here Generate Data Model UI Model Process Model Business Rules Development EnvironmentRuntime RDBMS Database Schema UI Model Process Metadata Business Rules User Interface (HTML/JavaScript) UI Controller Web Server

Life and Pensions Policy Administration

SO – the Four Tenets  Boundaries are Explicit  Services are Autonomous  Services Share Schema and Contract, not Class  Service Compatibility is based upon Policy

SOA – Basic Patterns  Document Processor  “How do you create a simple to use, well defined contract that remains compliant with the SO design tenets?”  Loose-coupling  Represent a business process as a complete unit of work  Idempotent Message  How can you ensure messages are idempotent  Insist on a unique “Unit of Work” ID in each message  Reservation  How can you maintain data consistency across a long running process?  Tentative operations  Confirmation, Cancellation, Timeout  Service Compatibility is based upon Policy

A SOA – Baseline XML RDBMS

SO – Common Customer Database  People have more than 1 Policy  Have to deal with more than 1 system – not happy  Ownership  Services for change  Replication, Versioning and Notification  Semantics  Keys

SOA - Composability

Conclusion  Service Orientation is Important for Insurers  Systems will change to loosely-coupled asynchronous collections of services  Far fewer assumptions, consistent architecture is essential  Tools, methodology and language need work