ACORD members have developed hundreds of messages over the years and many of them are very specific to a particular business transaction. I have always said that we are a data standards organization and that we create message standards. Of course, that has always been overly simplistic and I need to stop characterizing us in that way.
We're going up... the enterprise... that is. Not to suggest that ACORD's message oriented data standards do not have an implicit model or process perspective. The members that create the messages always bring some kind of context with them. But today, we have the tools to provide industry standards from an enterprise perspective. A top-down approach that can eliminate redundant development efforts and bring more data consistency across the enterprise, reach beyond organizational boundaries and span the insurance value chain.
We already have a Capability Model in place. We're working on a business dictionary/glossary and are planning a (logical or relational) Data Model and Process Maps. We're in the early stage of a conceptual design and proof of concept, if you will. As our members migrate to Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) we will be able to provide some of the tools they will need.
We're also talking to the Object Management Group (OMG) as they have modeling expertise and resources that we may be able to tap to our mutual benefit. Unfortunately, this all gets complicated really fast and my biggest challenge to to figure out how to most effectively communicate our plans. I'll keep you posted.