At Adaptik, we live and breathe policy administration. We’ve invested more than 60,000 person days developing our PolicyWriter solution. We know how to do policy administration right, but we also know what can go wrong. Here’s the sixth of what we call the Seven Deadly Sins of Policy Administration. Be sure to check back – the last one is coming soon.

Modern, configurable policy administration solutions, like PolicyWriter, offer users unprecedented flexibility and adaptability. With their unique, rules-based configuration tools, nearly any change is possible – all without an expensive, time-consuming development project.

But simply deploying such a powerful tool isn’t enough. Much thought needs to be given to changes – and how they’ll affect the holistic system – before they happen. Rules-based systems should always include features for multi-threaded development and full traceability of all changes. A governance body is required to establish priority and direction of how changes should be implemented.

At Adaptik, we think of modern policy administration systems as icebergs. At the top are the instantly recognizable pieces – configuration, simple rules changes, lifecycle transactions for policies. But beneath the water line must sit a properly thought-out architecture and process for managing the changes that are bound to be required.

Rule changes are often predicated on other rule changes; they build on one another and sometimes the order in which they are introduced needs to be changed while one or more are in flight. This fact has created endless bottlenecks in traditional policy administration systems. Moving to a configurable system alone, though, doesn’t automatically allow a carrier to clear such hurdles – poor rules management capabilities in a modern system can also create bottlenecks and hidden costs. Without a proper governance body in place and the supporting rule versioning tools, product initiatives will inevitably need to be single-threaded, affecting the ROI of the system as a whole.

At Adaptik, we think of modern policy administration systems as icebergs. At the top are the instantly recognizable pieces – configuration, simple rules changes, lifecycle transactions for policies. But beneath the water line must sit a properly thought-out architecture and process for managing the changes that are bound to be required. It’s too often overlooked, but it absolutely needs to be there. If it’s not, the effectiveness of even the most powerful, flexible policy administration solutions can be negated.