Interface innovation

Rough Notes, Oct 2003 by Ashenhurst, John

SoftTOP provides tools to build an intelligent document interface alternative

For many years it has seemed to me that the insurance industry is missing out on a practical, simple approach to interface. It's common for agents to e-mail electronic documents to carriers and visa versa. Typically the forms are printed out or perused by humans who re-key content into some other online form. But why not give the electronic forms two dimensions: a human-readable, paper-oriented dimension and a computer-readable, digitally oriented dimension?

When vendors began offering self-service online certificate programs, the fact that the services had only a human-readable dimension seemed to me a great failing. Since the forms were being created by Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat supported data being carried separately but along with the visual version of the form, it would make sense to add the data layer as well and let vendors or even agents create the software to suck the data out and use it for another purpose.

The same principle applies to electronic applications or any kind of electronic forms. Why just mimic the limitations of paper when the electronic documents can do even more than paper? They can have a kind of intelligence.

Last year when Microsoft began talking about Xdocs (XML-based Word and Excel documents to be part of Office 2003), it seemed to me that Microsoft was on to something important. I was further encouraged this past May when Microsoft announced it would create Word 2003 XML standard templates for all the paper ACORD forms, thus creating a foundation for intelligent documents. So the intelligent documents ball is rolling-or will be soon. With Microsoft offering a solution, others must be in the wings.

Here's the main point: We've been thinking about interface, that is the transfer of data between agencies and carriers, in terms of download/upload, real-time, and Web site channels. All of this requires vendors and carriers to set up and use complex technical infrastructure. But only bits and pieces of what was originally imagined have ever come to be. And the future remains cloudy.

While conventional machine-to-machine interface has been struggling over the years, e-mail-a form of person-to-person communication-has been flourishing. Millions of e-mails with document attachments are being sent back and forth across the industry and then are handled manually. But what if those attachments were both human and computer readable? E-mail could then become a powerful supplementary interface channel that could provide a useful service when more conventional interface isn't available or practical.

Of course it really isn't that simple. It's not enough for the attached documents to carry data. That's not intelligent enough. They also must carry edits and rules and play a role in a managed workflow. And it must be possible to maintain the edits and rules and to have different sets for different publishers and recipients.

The SoftTOP solution

Some clever folks in the Chicago area have been thinking about the problems and opportunities of intelligent forms for the last couple of years-and they've done something about it. It's called SoftTOP.

A few years ago, after selling Trimark (an annuity policy administration software business) to PeopleSoft, some of the business and development people at Trimark re-formed into a new company, SoftLife Corporation. Having noticed that building and maintaining complex insurance systems was expensive and time consuming, they vowed to create tools that would make the process much simpler-with the idea of creating an even better system than Trimark. But along the way, when they began to realize that the tools they were creating had much wider potential, they shifted their focus from the application to the tools/infrastructure business.

From the SoftLife point of view, all insurance transactions are about the use and processing of documents. In the past, and to a large extent today, these documents are paper, and the system in which they're used is enormously inefficient. If someone could create an environment that retained the forms paradigm but made the forms electronic and intelligent, the insurance process could be speeded up and made more accurate.

The issue then is how to create a forms-based system that's easy to build and maintain and undemanding to use-from a financial, technical, and training point of view. So SoftLife has created what amounts to a development environment (builder) and publishing environment (server) for intelligent forms. The builder uses Microsoft Word as the editor to create the forms and Excel as the editor to create the form edits and rules. Most business users know these two programs so the learning curve to create SoftTOP intelligent forms is short. When the forms are complete, SoftTOP generates XML metadata that describes the forms-fields, edits, and rules-and a PDF file with the appropriate form cosmetics. The metadata is used to process the forms in a production environment.