ING Asia Pacific's Mark Wales Develops Regional SOA-based Architecture

By developing a regional SOA-based architecture, CIO Mark Wales has given ING Asia Pacific business units more value from the enterprise IT function.

Expanding Application Reuse

To leverage the IA3 architecture to further expand the reuse of applications, Wales and his team developed a new strategy in late 2006, known as "Standardization Through Reuse." Among the first resulting reusable applications was the Operational Data Store (ODS), a common data source to service call centers, customer and agency Web sites, and agency management systems that creates an operational single client view, Wales says. He notes that ODS was developed with help from IBM's (Armonk, N.Y.) IAA models, Oracle (Redwood Shores, Calif.) and Informatica (Redwood City, Calif.).

A major driver behind ING Asia Pacific's SOA initiative was its diverse IT environment, a product of the company's growth through acquisition, according to Wales. Legacy systems are pervasive in such a diverse IT environment, so a "consistent approach" was needed to expose services, he explains. "To facilitate this we created our SOA Cookbook, an SOA methodology developed specifically for insurance," Wales says. "It gave us a country-agnostic set of processes and activities upon which to base this work."

While Wales aims to develop consistencies and standardize applications across the enterprise (the carrier recently selected Chester, Pa.-based AdminServer as its new regional policy administration system for future deployments), he says he is not looking to consolidate his operations. Wales is quick to point out that the various arms of his organization all contributed to ING Asia Pacific's IT turnaround. The ODS application, for example, was developed in Korea and now is being expanded by the team in Japan, while the SOA Cookbook was created in Australia.

"We have centers of excellence and multidisciplined communities that work across countries," Wales says. "Instead of replacing the IT departments in our business units, we're leveraging them."

CIO, ING Insurance and Investment Management Asia Pacific (Hong Kong; US$100 billion in aum).

IT Infrastructure: Due to acquisitions and a historically decentralized IT organization, the carrier's IT environment is very diverse. Currently, for example, the company is running five separate instances of CSC's LiFE/Asia policy admin system.

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