Intelligent Enterprise

I attended a session at Software AG's recent Innovation World 2008 conference in which Cory Kirspel, VP of identity risk management at ChoicePoint (a LexisNexis company), described how the company has created an external-facing solution using business process management (BPM), business activity monitoring (BAM) and an enterprise service bus (ESB). ChoicePoint screens and authenticates people for employment screening, insurance services and other identity-related purposes, plus does court document retrieval. There's a fine line to walk here: companies need to protect the privacy of individuals while minimizing identify fraud.

Even though the company only really does two things — credential and investigate people and businesses — it had 43+ separate applications on 12 platforms with various technologies in order to do it. Not only did that make it hard to do what they needed internally, customers were also wanting to integrate ChoicePoint's systems directly into their own with an implementation time of only three to four months, and provide visibility into the processes.

ChoicePoint was already a Software AG customer with the legacy modernization products, so it took a look at their BPM, BAM and ESB. The implementation that followed has brought better visibility, and the company found it could leverage the tools to build solutions much faster, since they weren't building everything from the ground up. Kirspel walked us through some of the application screens developed for use in customer call centers: a CSR can enter some data about a caller, select a matching identity by address, verify the identity (e.g., does the SSN match the name), authenticate the caller with questions that only they could answer, then provide a pass/fall result. The overall flow and the parameters for every screen can be controlled by the customer organization, and the whole flow is driven by a process model in the BPMS, which allows can be used to assign and track KPIs on each step in the process.

The company is also moving executives from the old way of keeping an eye on business — looking at historical reports — to the new way with near real-time dashboards. As well as having visibility into transaction volumes, the company is also able to detect unusual situations that might indicate fraud, or other situations of increased risk, and alert customers. The company found that BAM and BI were misunderstood, poorly managed and under-leveraged; these technologies could be used on legacy systems to start getting benefits even before BPM was added into the mix.

All of this allowed ChoicePoint to reduce the cost of ownership, which supports a business that competes on price, as well as offering a level of innovation and integration with customer systems that competitors are unable to achieve.

ChoicePoint used Software AG's professional services, and it paired each external person with an internal one in order to achieve knowledge transfer.

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