Vignette Closes 3 Insurance Deals

Reflecting insurers' ongoing efforts to Web-enable their back offices and extend CRM applications across the enterprise, Vignette Corp. (Austin) has inked a contract with Teacher's Insurance and Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF, $290 billion in assets under management, New York) to provide applications for the redesign of TIAA-CREF's Business and Associate Services Environment (BASE), the carrier's enterprise-wide intranet.

The TIAA-CREF pact is the third insurance contract announced by Vignette in the past week, joining deals with Santa Ana, CA-based PacifiCare Health Systems and American International Underwriters (AIU), a New York-based overseas P&C subsidiary of AIG.

TIAA-CREF turned to Vignette as traffic growth and burgeoning content had begun to tax the BASE intranet, which was originally designed as a reference source for its 6,101 employees. "We had been doing intranets for about four years and as we evolved very quickly, we had multiple content management systems, some automated, some partially manual," says Greg Goldman, manager of corporate intranet systems, TIAA-CREF.

The quantity of information made available was a significant achievement, Goldman adds, but "the problem was organizing it—we had reached information overload." Conversion of material to Web-based applications was delayed and ease of navigation was impacted, Goldman adds. "Vignette is allowing us to manage the information and tailor it to employees, based on profiles."

The carrier will implement Vignette Content Management Server, Vignette Lifecycle Personalization Server and Vignette Content Syndication Server. According to the vendor, the applications will enable employees to log on to a new intranet and receive information based on employee profile and related business rules.

The TIAA-CREF implementation resembles that of other Vignette insurance clients in that it is designed to "bring together a lot of systems that weren't meant to communicate," says Santi Pierini, vice president of corporate strategy, Vignette. The end result is a customized home page where individual employees can go to "one-stop shop" for all the information or applications needed to perform their jobs, Pierini adds.

The implementation also reflects a larger industry trend to focus Web technologies for back-office purposes, according to Pierini. "Traditional e-CRM has been focused on call center management, but now we're seeing a trend to more higher-value customer interaction reaching deeper into the value chain," he says. Part of the motivation, Pierini asserts, is "a desire not to expose the new technology publicly during the learning curve. It starts with an employee-facing portal to help that employee do their job better, which will in turn affect the entire enterprise."

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