For the Business, By the Business
Competing in an Anemic Market
Some such change is needed to deal with the business challenges that insurers face today, in the view of Srinivas Koushik, senior vice president, enterprise CTO and infrastructure CIO for Columbus, Ohio-based Nationwide ($16.8 billion in revenue). Koushik notes that companies need to grow top-line revenues in a fairly anemic market, while driving down costs and increasing profitability.
According to Koushik, Nationwide is seeking innovative ideas to address the challenge, including incremental changes to optimize business processes and even "game changing" initiatives - such as the company's foray into the health and absence management marketplace with its Gates McDonald subsidiary.
But, "In order for a lot of these new ideas to succeed, we have to be prepared to move pretty quickly and be prepared to fail in a few instances," Koushik says. "We've set for ourselves the motto that 'The best line of code written is the one you don't have to write,' so we're trying to get into the assemble model versus the build model." For example, six months ago, Nationwide launched a service called BlueSpark, which provides small- and medium-size business owners with a hosted service for functions including human resources management and customer relationship management.
"All the market data suggested that it would be a good idea, but all IT build projections were in terms of years - and we couldn't take that kind of time," Koushik relates. "We needed to integrate different applications - such as ASPs for CRM - into a seamless service, so we moved pretty quickly from a business process model to an assemble-type mode."
Another way Nationwide is driving speed to market through reduced coding is the use of business process execution language (BPEL). Within the infrastructure group, which Koushik runs, the carrier developed a pilot to automate its customer supply chain. The established procedure involved placement of an order for infrastructure products or services, followed by a quality assurance (QA), and then, depending on the nature of the order, the ordering of parts, building, provisioning and notification of the item's availability to the customer. "It's a workflow that tends to go across multiple departments and multiple parts of my unit," Koushik explains. "In most cases, the workflow is handled with a mixture of a little automation and a lot of manual processes sitting in people's heads."
Under those conditions, provisioning typically took weeks and often required process changes to be worked in, Koushik relates. "The problem that we ran into time and time again was that - while the redesign would eventually get done - tying the underlying systems together was always a huge development effort," he recalls.
The BPEL pilot utilized an IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) integrated visual tool set compatible with Nationwide's use of the vendor's WebSphere Studio Application Integration Edition, which provides a visual palette where the user can map processes. "You actually paint boxes while directing the course of the order and implementing rules, such as, 'If an order doesn't pass QA, you must send a notification back to the customer,'" relates Koushik. "The individual boxes may be supported by multiple applications, but you connect through Web services and let the business process automation tool drive the process." What used to happen through a series of largely manual interfaces is now much more streamlined. Thus, the provisioning time has been reduced to mere days, and actually changing the environment is significantly easier, according to Koushik.
Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio
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