The insurance industry is abuzz with the process-transforming potential of Web services, supported by service-oriented architecture (SOA), which creates enormous opportunity for integrating disparate and geographically dispersed systems, applications and programs.

By treating various functions as services, SOA lets those systems, applications and programs talk to one another, without having to create (or pay for) application program interfaces (APIs). Each self-contained service is completely independent of all other services.

The result is that underlying technologies are transparent to most end-users. As functional commodities, technology and software become "black boxes." Their mechanics may be of interest to the IT specialist, but they're immaterial to business users. What they deliver is everything. In that context, the real value of service-oriented architecture is derived by employing it in the context of a data-focused technology strategy.