IDIOM Decision Suite - Configurable product
This paper describes the concept of Configurable Product – a systems approach to dramatically reducing the time, cost and risk associated with introducing new business products, and altering or customising existing products. While this paper discusses Configurable Product in the context of the insurance industry, it is applicable across a wide range of industries. The term Configurable Product refers to the complete definition, deployment and maintenance of computer supported products without the need to write or change computer code. Implementing Configurable Product demands certain characteristics within the host computer environment. These are discussed, as is the nature and role of a new tool labelled the ‘product configurator’.
Underlying Business Rationale
At Idiom, we take the view that the majority of investment in computer code is in providing the application infrastructure – managing business-neutral aspects of the system such as presentation, security, database, communications, and many aspects of workflow/process management.
This major code investment is driven primarily by the technology platform, remaining similar regardless of the business objects supported. Only a relatively small proportion of the code is specific to business knowledge and practices. But it is this relatively small proportion which differentiates a business from its competitors, and which defines its competitive advantage. Furthermore when we look at how computer code is managed, we typically find it is managed using one common approach– rather than allowing different sets of code to respond to different change drivers, as they should.
Even within the business-specific code there are variations in the ‘change drivers’. Externally defined business objects tend to change only slowly. For example: customers retain broadly the same external ‘characteristics’ over long periods of time (although the importance that we attach to these characteristics may change more often); similarly, accounting practices are subject to very little change. The stability of these externally defined business objects contrast with the volatility of company product lines, which are changing increasingly frequently – perhaps for each new distribution partnership, or even for a single new client. The increasing importance of niche products is putting pressure on the product cycle time.
Despite the divergent needs of these ‘change drivers’, there is usually only one ‘SDLC’ (systems development life cycle) – which is often cumbersome and expensive to execute.
At Idiom, it is our contention that extracting and detaching the product specific elements of the system provides the opportunity to create a new ‘product development life cycle’ – one that is tuned to faster and lower cost implementation. We call this new process ‘Configurable Product’.