Applied Systems, AMS Services, and DORIS have all agreed to use IVANS' Transformation Station to facilitate agency/company real-time and batch interface. Is SEMCI just around the corner? Not quite.
There is a real danger that over-enthusiastic reporting of the AMS commitment to Transformation Station will lead to unrealistic expectations by agents. For the last 20 years, agents have been told that the solution to the multi-carrier data exchange problem is right around the corner. Because of the perpetual gap between promise and reality over the last ten or fifteen years, agents have moved from being hopeful, to skeptical, then to cynical, and now to being apathetic. Vendor convergence on Transformation Station is only another waypoint on a long and frustrating journey.
What is Transformation Station?
According to IVANS, "Transformation Station…now provides one-stop shopping for agency vendors and companies. Whether the solution is real-time, batch, store and forward, immediate mailboxing, or a combination, the business can be conducted through a single infrastructure."
Under-appreciated issues
Transformation Station advocates imply or openly suggest that the only thing that stands in the way of achieving long-promised SEMCI (real-time and batch) is carrier commitment, a little coding, and not much else. Would that it were that simple. As far as I can tell, there's little public recognition of the continuing substantive barriers to SEMCI —even with vendor commitment to Transformation Station. Among them are the following:
Translation: Technical geniuses have been working on transaction translators for at least the last 40 years. Transformation Station, in part, is one such translator, but it can't solve every insurance translation need with just a little coding.
Priority: Even if Transformation Station made translations a no-brainer, vendors and carriers must establish a priority of attention. They can't work on everything simultaneously. Much of the attention being given to Transformation Station now is focused on real-time quoting. Is that the best place to start?
User interface: Transformation Station says nothing about the way the transactions appear to the user. With some reason, carriers worry that the advantage they've gained through controlling the presentation on their sites will be lost when the field is leveled through a user interface provided by a vendor, so they may drag their feet.
Authentication: Can Transformation Station find an authentication scheme that every carrier will agree to? Or will each agency need to use a variety of authentication/signon methods when hooked to Transformation Station, one for each carrier, the clumsy situation they face today?
Edit management: Transformation Station is intended to make it possible to pass clean, edited transactions to the carrier system so they can be processed automatically. But Transformation Station contains two incompatible edit systems. That means twice the work for carriers to create and maintain edit schemes.
Web services: The idea is that ultimately agency management systems would have continuous real-time conversations with carrier systems mediated by Transformation Station. Unfortunately, it is certain that operational problems not now imagined will crawl out of the woodwork and make remote Web services and Transformation Station difficult or even untenable, at least for a while.
Infrastructure: Transformation Station can only be used by carriers and agencies that have the right hardware and software infrastructure. But given the inertia of installed hardware and software, the upgrade process will take years and perhaps can't even be justified by all parties
None of the issues above precludes eventual success with Transformation Station, but they do suggest that "Transformationing" the industry to use it isn't trivial. Perhaps being realistic about what to expect with Transformation Station would better serve agents, carriers, and vendors than some of the uncritical optimism we've been hearing.
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