Chapter 3: Highlight Insurance

Overview

To illustrate an SOA implementation from a business point of view, this chapter introduces Highlight Insurance, Inc., a fictitious enterprise that sells car insurance. We review the company's concerns, along with the changes that will be needed to support the company's expansion. We then consider how to design software whose structure reflects the business process.

We talk only about sales, not about the insurance claims that follow accidents and hail storms. From the customer's point of view, a sales interaction with the company has two main steps.

First, the customer submits a quote request, providing data that the company uses to determine whether to issue a quote (a price for a given policy, for a given customer). If the company decides to issue a quote, the two parties may interact repeatedly to find a suitable combination of price and coverage.

In the second step, the customer submits a policy request, furnishing the data needed to ask for the coverage specified in an earlier quote. The policy request includes a deposit, and on receipt of that fee, Highlight uses industry sources to determine the customer's credit worthiness and to verify details that were provided by the customer. Those details include, for example, the traffic-violation history of each driver on the requested policy.

An industry-standard phrase for a quote request is insurance application, but in this book, we use the word application only when referring to software.