IBM has announced it will be donating technology assets, including its Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) Business Object/Data Model and the IAA Product Specification Diagram (PSD) Notation to help promote insurance industry standards.

These technology assets that are built combining IBM hardware, software and research will be donated to the Association for Co-operative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), a non-profit standards development organisation serving the insurance and financial services industries.

The company's announcement will build on an effort to encourage collaboration and drive innovation in the insurance sector., with the adoption of standardised business processes and models making it easier for insurers to work with agents, brokers and other data partners.

It also represents a significant contribution of intellectual property associated with IBM's insurance industry models. The donated models are from IAA - the company's insurance business and IT architecture framework. IAA is continually developed by IBM in collaboration with 100 leading insurance companies across the world, and the IAA model has been licensed by more than 200 insurers worldwide. IAA Business Object/Data Model, coupled with the existing ACORD Information Model, will form the building blocks for the next version of the ACORD Information Model.

"Over the past year, ACORD with previous donations and member participation, created the initial Information Model in an effort to provide an industry-owned model," said John Kellington, senior vice-president of ACORD.

"IBM's donation will allow ACORD to leverage IBM's 20 years of experience in building an insurance industry model to further develop the ACORD Information Model. The consolidation of the two models will be available to the industry participants for future innovation."

IAA is part of IBM's Industry Models portfolio, a comprehensive family of data, process and service models that are widely used across industries. Going forward, IBM will continue to work closely with ACORD to align IBM's rich set of IAA models with ACORD's standards portfolio. In addition, implementation guides and supporting tools will be issued by ACORD to foster the adoption and expansion of the framework.

"The synergy of IAA and ACORD working together to create full, robust, flexible insurance assets will aid the ACORD standards group to leverage an insurance industry blueprint with a full operational payload. In this case, both assets will be stronger for this collaboration," said Michael Daugherty, president of the independent IBM Industry Models User's Group (IMUG) and architect at Liberty Mutual Agency Markets Information Services.

"IBM and ACORD show true thought leadership by combining the power of ACORD's existing Information Model and their insurance industry information exchange standards, with the depth, flexibility, and operational richness of the IAA Business Object/Data Model."