The Engagement

Vision Service Plan (Vision Service Plan) is the leading eye care insurance provider in North America. While the company has owned a longtime competitive edge over the rest of the industry, a recent look in its rear view mirror showed that it must re-engineer the way it brought products to market. Vision Service Plan concluded it was taking too long to develop and launch its products, and needed to move more quickly to respond to both customer needs and moves made by the competition.

Vision Service Plan engaged Primitive Logic to help develop and implement the IT vision and strategy to help realize these business and technology goals.

The Primitive Logic Approach

Primitive Logic implemented a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as the foundation of the technology strategy. As part of the SOA, Vision Service Plan implemented IBM's WebSphere Business Integration products for data sharing and integration within the enterprise.

Based on defined business objectives, Primitive Logic teams deployed across the IT organization to review in-place processes and resources. We then developed the SOA strategy to align the business objectives with in-house resources, developing an architecture for both the SOA solution and the resources that support it.

Primitive Logic's SOA is fundamentally an "integration architecture," based on a set of principles and objectives that focus on integration and agility.

Primitive Logic's SOA for Vision Service Plan provides the following benefits:

• Increases business agility by supporting changes in business requirements and services, instead of requiring the business to change to accommodate the architecture, technologies, or applications.
• Eliminates redundancies and inconsistencies in business processing and business information.
• Improves integration by discarding the point-to-point and brittle interfaces of the existing integration touch points.
• Promotes the reuse of existing legacy systems when they can be cost-effectively adapted and integrated into the architecture.
• Supports open standards such as Java and Web Services.

Outcome

As new SOA Services are rolled out throughout 2006 and 2007, VSP will have access to key customer data that will allow it to efficiently and cost effectively analyze and develop its products. The solution offers deep functionality that includes:

• Newly accessible marketing data from previously unavailable internal CRM systems
• Rapid distribution of products to sales channels by providing external agents access to policy information
• Lower internal IT costs by implementing reusable services and open IT standards-eliminating redundancies in programming and application development.
• An on-demand technology platform that supports business functions and business processes efficiently and effectively

With each benefit mapped to specific business drivers, Vision Service Plan's SOA solution will help rapidly distribute new products to Vision Service Plan agents, and increase the speed that new products are brought to market.