Unum is laying a foundation for the future.

A leading provider of employee benefits, including disabilityinsurance, long-term care, and life and voluntary benefits, thecompany is in the midst of a multiyear business initiative tointegrate product and service portfolios from disparate legacysystems onto a new Web-enabled common platform.

"This is one of the most comprehensive and transformationalinitiatives within our U.S. business," explains Kathy Owen, Unum'ssenior vice president of IT business applications, who oversees theproject. "We're undergoing significant changes within our companyand our business processes."

Called Simply Unum, the initiative involves an end-to-endintegration of processes from initial quotes and proposals toenrollment to claims. Owen says the project will allow the companyto introduce new products and services and enhance its Web-basedself-services for acquisition, billing, policy management, andclaims.

"Simply Unum is a tightly integrated technical operatingplatform that leverages many of our core enterprise businesscapabilities," she contends.

Launched internally in June 2005, Simply Unum is part of acompanywide strategy to roll out products and services to grow thebusiness, lower operating expenses, and improve customer retention."One of the key values that has come out of this project iscollaboration," Owen says. "We now have the benefit of many morepeople who understand the business from a broad perspective and areable to weigh decisions and their impact across theorganization."

"From an IT perspective, it's wonderful to have this kind oflong-term strategy and willingness to make such a major investmentfor our future," she adds.

With an IT budget of approximately $150 million, Unum's U.S. ITdepartment employs about 800 people who support the company'sapplications and infrastructure. An additional 150 offshorecontractors work on application development or maintenance.

Based on a service-oriented architecture, Simply Unum uses aseries of service interface packages with multiple operations toalign processes with different business domains. The IT team hasdeveloped approximately 300 discrete business operations across 25different interface packages.

"I've learned that transformation has many layers," Owen says."In order to do things faster, you really have to modify theprocesses you use to get things done. Within IT, we've had toreassess how we go about doing things."

Simply Unum currently is in the testing phase. Owen expects toroll out the first set of deliverables for front-end processes thissummer. A second set of deliverables is expected to follow 8 to 10weeks later.

"This is a key part of where we're going, and it willmaterialize in multiple phases over the next several years," shesays.

Owen, who has spent her entire career at Unum, initially had noplans to work in IT or the insurance industry. After graduatingfrom Tennessee Technological University with a degree in biology,she worked briefly as a control biologist for a pharmaceuticalcompany. She learned about UnumProvident while looking for a summerjob and joined the company's IT department as a programmer traineein 1975.

"I came into IT with little knowledge of either IT or theinsurance industry," Owen admits. "Technology was changing at arapid pace in the mid-'70s, and it was beginning to transform theway business was being conducted internally."

During the next 30 years, Owen moved up the ranks within the ITdepartment, serving as manager of system development and vicepresident of individual systems. She was promoted to senior vicepresident of IT business applications in May 2003.

"Working in IT really allows you to understand the business youwork for on a detail level," she asserts. "It makes you feel likeyou have a direct impact on the success of the company."

Once Simply Unum is well under way, Owen plans to direct herattention to other strategic projects and additional capabilitiesto help the company succeed. These include providing enhancedservices for brokers, new products and product partnerships, andmarket extension. "There's a lot more to come," she promises.