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Phase I (Sep 92 - Jun 93): Proposed functionality

'Now we decided that we weren't going to replace these mainframes in the various countries because that would be a massive job, we needed to get the benefit of the investment in IT as quickly as we could so we decided to ... this fitted in with what Colin had said in the strategy anyway ... put our own kind of system in these countries that sat alongside the mainframes and if possible drove the mainframe. Now we quickly established that we couldn't really drive the mainframe, what we mean by driving the mainframe is that you put all the policy and underwriting information into the X system and you just export it/load it whatever term you want to use into the mainframe. But the IT people just weren't going to buy that in these countries.

... And I suppose I took the view quickly what we ought to do, on the claims side is just take a download of information, ... and on the underwriting side my view was that we could put the underwriter's policy information into the X system and then they would have to re-key it to the mainframe which at the time was accepted. Now keeping it in proportion, in America there are only eighty programmes ... about 400 I think in the UK, and about thirty or forty in Holland. So you're not talking about a huge volume of information to be put in and ... all they hold on the mainframes in these countries is very limited underwriting information. ...

So having made that decision we were looking at building a Multinational system that enables programmes to be set up, let's take the ICI example, programmes to be set up in the UK, say it's got a policy in the US and Holland and France, ... that policy will be transmitted over the network to America because they would have a database in America, over the network to Rotterdam in Holland because they have a database and in France where we haven't got a link in phase one because we couldn't afford to do more than three countries in phase one in fact three countries was too many in hind sight ... For ... the policy in France the system would basically produce a document that could be faxed and ideally the system would do the faxing as well.

... then for claims when there are claims against that policy against the US they go onto the US database they're downloaded to the X system. ... and that gets the claim onto the X system in the US and then that claim is then transferred over the network back to the UK. So the person in the UK has the record of that claim on the database. ... If there was a claim in France where there isn't a link then they do what they do at the moment send in a form that says we've got a claim and then that claim is actually inputted into the X database in the UK. So ... by doing that we have a full record of all the claims for that particular programme.

... So if you think about it it's a distributed system in that sense, in the UK you have information on the X database where all the programmes are controlled from the UK and all the business that is serviced in the UK.'

X013 page 013.01 (tape 02..) Gordan Notes/Trans/Tape 30/09/93

Social influence: Organisation: Physical
Technical influence: System characteristics: Functionality


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