Blue Cross & Blue Shield

• March 12, 2001

Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island beats Y2K deadline

A Y2K problem without a solution led to the development of an innovative customer service application in less than a year at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island (BCBSRI).

The new customer service system is based on an internally developed architecture that Keane Inc. Innovator Awards judges lauded as modular and flexible enough to easily allow for system upgrades and the incorporation of new technology. Failure to complete the project — and to eliminate potential Y2K problems — could have caused serious problems for BCBSRI.

The decision to build a new customer service system, a mission-critical application that monitors and records communications with policy holders, was made in mid-1998 when IT officials determined that the existing proprietary system could not be made Y2K compliant. The insurer's first move was to seek out proposals from suppliers of packaged customer service/ CRM systems, but that plan was quickly scratched when "the costs would have been far higher than expected," Meyer said. Those projected $1 million-plus costs included the price of the app itself and the cost of integrating that software with the installed proprietary BCBSRI claims system, he said.

Meyer said his unit chose the Sybase tools and application server because of its experience with PowerBuilder. The project was vital, he said, and "we didn't want to have to introduce another skill set" to the developers. The Sybase application server was selected for its tight integration with PowerBuilder, which offered the promise of a familiar environment to build components, whose logic could be automatically deployed to the Windows NT-based EAServer, where it could be integrated with data residing on the BCBSRI mainframe. The tight integration between PowerBuilder and EAServer also promised that the new system could be extended to the Internet, Meyer said.

Once an architecture was designed internally and a development plan began to form by Thanksgiving 1998, the team brought in consultants from the Middleware Consulting Group, Walpole, Mass., to assess and validate the blueprint. That assessment was completed and the plan validated by consultants by the end of 1998, with internal work on the project beginning in January 1999, Meyer said.

The project team included five full-time developers using RAD techniques, a project manager and a part-time technical architect. The group utilized a technical expert from the consulting group to provide additional support to ensure that the architecture would support the new application and planned enhancements.

To ensure that features could be added as needed, the architecture's modular and flexible design allowed for modules of specific functionality to be implemented quickly as needed. Developers used the HOW component development and deployment environment from Riverton Corp., Burlington, Mass., to map out the component architecture and to generate objects and skeleton code.

As hoped, Meyer said the new three-tier architecture allows IT developers to reuse the new systems logic, and ensures that middle tier (EAServer) app information is consistent across the organization.

Meyer noted that BCBSRI has already built a Web-based customer service app — described as a "portal for members" — that leverages the new architecture. "We hear about companies spending millions to enable customer service on the Internet. We'll be doing it for a lot less," he said.
— Michael W. Bucken