Most companies can fix a problem once they know where the problem originates, but what if a company doesn't realize where the problems are taking place or whether a problem even exists? Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota decided it needed to deal with response-time issues for agents, call centers, and policy-holders seeking information from the Blue Cross Web site, correcting problems before they mushroom.
"We had a lot of tools that could tell us what was going on in our environment once we knew we had a problem," says David Thomas, senior director of technology support for Blue Cross. "But what we found was if we got a call that told us we had a response-time issue, we ended up having to look at all the different components of the infrastructure to find out what was going on." What the insurer wanted, however, was to be able to look quickly at one tool and assess how response time was being affected.
Finding the source of problems was an ordeal, admits Thomas. IT staff would sift through some of the more complex applications when an issue was brought up by one of Blue Cross' customer service representatives or claims examiners.
Blue Cross went through an RFP program, but it was an advertisement for software developer OpTier that caught the attention of one of the Blue Cross architects. "It sounded just like what we wanted, but we were skeptical," recalls Thomas. Blue Cross did a proof of concept with OpTier and one other company before selecting OpTier earlier this year. "[CoreFirst] did everything the company said it would do. It was very easy to install, and we had it working pretty much within the first couple of days of the proof of concept," says Thomas. "It was a very clean solution."
As a business strategy, Blue Cross has driven as much as it can to Web portals to make information access easier for customers. One of the ways the insurer was able to use the OpTier tool was with a major account that had sent out a notice to its employees to begin using the Blue Cross Web site. This created a spike in activity. "We were able to monitor that activity and found the time for log-ins was longer than we'd like," relates Thomas. The IT staff was able to drill down specifically to the queries that were causing the longer response time, and the development team was able to get the delays corrected so they didn't impact the customers. "Before, we might not have noticed we had a problem unless someone called," says Thomas.
Blue Cross IT leaders anticipated they were going to have to sell their developers on the OpTier tool, but once the developers got into the first training session, Thomas reports most were excited about the level of information they could reach. Developers use the tool to discover where the bottlenecks might be, and they integrate that information into the development process to chip away at problems, he explains.
The carrier appreciates the tool's ability to prioritize transactions, Thomas asserts. "We've been doing that in the mainframe environment for years, but we didn't have a good way to do that in a distributed environment," he says. "We need to go back to our business areas and talk to them about what transactions they value more than others. If they have a choice to make between two customer transactions, [they indicate] which of those is more important, and then we can give priority to that one. We've been approaching that slowly and building a comfort level with the tool as a whole before we jump into that."
The main benefit for Blue Cross, Thomas believes, is the ability to view a level of information it never has been able to attain before. "To be able to see how the applications are behaving without having to have an architectural diagram that explains where all the components are being touched is a great benefit," he concludes. "OpTier sees that behavior and maps it for us. To get those metrics about utilization and response time are things from a capacity perspective that are just wonderful."
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