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SEMCI IN THE NEW WORLD OF INFORMATION

New technology doesn't eliminate need for standards

"The Internet and the World Wide Web have changed
what we view as the SEMCI solution."

By Gregory A. Maciag, President & CEO, ACORD

SEMCI, with all that it represents, is an essential business requirement. Fundamentally, it means that users do not want to repeat work--doing the same work over and over again, such as re-keying the same information in different computer systems. The corollary of not repeating work is being able to exchange information with other computer systems--not just data but documents as well, because we have a need to move and share unstructured data, such as e-mail or images.

The original premise of the SEMCI model was that the agency computer system would be the means of entering and storing information, and that the exchange would be transparent to the end user. The reality is that the Internet and the World Wide Web have changed what we view as the SEMCI solution.

Undreamed of in the days when SEMCI was first demanded by agents, the Web has become a prime marketplace for conducting business. ACORD's Web site, for example, is a place where Standards Subcommittees vote on maintenance requests, agents download ACORD Forms to their agency systems, industry members register to attend our annual Technology Conference, and software providers update their product information for the ACORD Insurance Software Directory.

We all recognize that the agency management system scenario as the sole window to gain the SEMCI world needs to be broadened. APT has recognized that fact in the development of their very successful webSEMCI, providing the same functionality as their SEMCI Access Module, in a browser environment.

But while the Web facilitates communication between business partners, the development of proprietary solutions for Web traffic threatens to return the insurance industry to the pre-SEMCI days. To prevent fragmentation, ACORD has agreed to lead an industry effort to develop a common (standard) vocabulary for the exchange of insurance information over the Web. As I write this, a team of industry experts is at work creating that standard vocabulary in XML, eXtensible Markup Language, a technology standard supported by Microsoft, IBM, and Sun Microsystems.

XML provides an easy way to process data on the Web; it is flexible and easily extended to account for changing requirements. It is also a very efficient way to transfer structured data between applications--and that's why it's so important to provide industry standards.

Using XML, we can label items on pages by using a tag that the computer can understand, such as driver name, vehicle identification number, date of birth, rate, or premium. If developers want to use XML to tag data, they can do so. In fact, you and I can create our own tags; we can create our own libraries and even our own vocabularies. But what good would that do us?

If everyone crafts his/her own XML definitions, we will have repeated history and re-created the morass of incompatible systems we have long lived with. By working toward shared, industry-standard vocabularies, we can deliver interoperability and information sharing, without the non-compliant behaviors that still proliferate in our industry.

The key to preserving SEMCI is to be certain that all these systems can share information so users do not need to re-enter information, and to ensure that the information can be moved to all trading partners. With these two requirements satisfied, we achieve SEMCI in the new world of information management. *