Companies are always searching for ways to increase control over every stage of the business lifecycle. Unfortunately, knowledge and information about how to best realize business objectives are often scattered and (un)safely stored in the heads of a minority of people within the organization. Whether it concerns data management, business rules or system development, knowledge is often unstructured and therefore, systemically unusable.
IG&H has developed a single application in which all available business knowledge within an organization can be mapped and automated, called “the product configurator”. The basis of the application is a matrix of concept definitions and relationships that can exist between knowledge and information within a particular domain such as pensions, banking, health care and retail. In the application, this “ontology” is combined with an automated way of working. Using the tool, the data can be mapped by the business, transforming single bits of knowledge into information. This enables our customers to get a better handle on their own products, processes and data. We call it Model-based Engineering and it is how we align business and IT to enable effective digital transformations.
The configurator can be used for a wide range of applications including product development, system engineering, data classification/migration and (model- based) testing. We combine the exceptional development speed of the OutSystems platform with the flexibility and robustness of our pension administration solution, powered by the configurator, which contains the underlying business requirements.
This method has proven extremely effective in the pension domain in which we have achieved 80% market saturation in the Netherlands, including all of the largest players. As an example, we used the solution to automate the implementation of a data quality framework at one of the largest Dutch pension providers. At the end of 2019 we extended the application’s capabilities to other domains, including banking, where we are working with a number of different organizations to extend our reach.
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Adri de Vrij