• December 2008 FEATURE ARTICLES •
Health Plans and Technology
Content is King
A Minnesota Blue expands its Web presence and streamlines content management, reducing administrative burdens on IT.
By Tom Chaffee
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota
(BCBSMN) is the largest health plan in the state, providing
health coverage to more than 2.9 million members. By law, all
health plans in the state are required to operate as non-profit
organizations. This creates some fairly unique circumstances for
our business, since we compete for market share as any
for-profit would. Like all health insurance companies, we have
come to rely greatly on our public Web site as a primary channel
for communicating with members, employers, brokers and agents
and healthcare providers. Equally important, however, are our
corporate intranets that facilitate collaboration and the flow
of business within our organization.
While an expanded Web presence and robust use
of corporate intranets improve service and enhance
collaboration, they can also present new organizational and IT
management challenges. In the case of BCBSMN, we found that the
need for IT involvement in content publishing and management was
creating a strain on internal resources as well as hindering the
company’s ability to keep content fresh and dynamic.
Challenges
In 2002, we launched an initiative that would
transfer Web content management from our IT team to
line-of-business managers in an effort to increase the quality
of content and significantly reduce the time and resources
required to maintain our public site as well as corporate
intranets. We have more than 10 external facing Web sites and
more than 20 intranet Web sites. Along the way, our quest for
improved management of Web content helped to lay the foundation
for a much larger initiative. We began the creation of a
comprehensive content management strategy designed to help us
improve control of our diverse content, which ranges from plan
descriptions to financial data and comes in many different
formats from an enterprise level, not just the employee or
project level.
The BCBSMN Web site (www.bluecrossmn.com) is
our principal communication vehicle for reaching all of our
stakeholder groups. It delivers valuable content to members
about emerging health developments and trends that promote
healthy living, as well as self-service answers to many of their
plan-related questions. Similarly, the site provides valuable
content for our employer, provider, and agent/broker communities
— helping us to improve the level of service we deliver.
As BCBSMN increasingly leveraged the Web site
and corporate intranets as valuable business tools, the IT team
faced a growing burden. By 2001, we had five full-time Web
engineers working to process and publish content that came in
from across the organization. Even then, we found it
increasingly difficult to respond quickly to requests to post
new content or revise existing content. To request an update,
content owners would send Web site updates to the IT staff via
e-mail with an attached document describing the request. A Web
engineer would then convert the document into an HTML format,
make the edits, and begin the production and deployment
processes. On average, the process took three or more days to
post a change, and the content owner was beholden to the IT team
and its schedule to move the process forward.
The Solution
In 2002, we began the search for a solution
to streamline Web content management, automate workflows and
processes as well as devolve responsibility for publishing to
line-of-business managers to accelerate processes and drive
better content. We selected Oracle Universal Content Management
as the cornerstone of our Web content management initiative.
Using the new system, Web and intranet content is now in the
hands of line-of-business managers, which eases the burden on
our IT team. Prior to the implementation, the IT department was
responsible for all changes to Web site content. The new system
enables our IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives
while allowing us to reduce the number of Web engineers focused
on content publishing from five to two.
It also empowers managers with greater
autonomy to post and edit content faster, reducing the time
required to complete Web site updates from an average of three
days to just 15 to 20 minutes. Users can modify content easily
by browsing to a page, logging in, and editing and previewing
changes directly from the Web site, without the need for a
tedious copy-and-paste procedure.
Currently, we are rolling out approximately
three Web sites a quarter including many sub-sites of the main
BCBSMN site. After our Web development team sets up the
framework for new sites, including setting the content
management parameters in the Oracle solution, site owners are
free to publish as they see fit. The solution enables us to
maintain our corporate brand across sites and pages, while still
giving content owners new flexibility. Additionally, it enables
the Web team to control architecture and presentation while
distributing the actual site development and maintenance to the
business units. Content authors can easily add, modify and
approve content within the context of their Web sites.
We also use the Web content management
solution to manage content contribution and consumption on the
intranet. By logging-in to the intranet, members can retrieve
documents and forms, which they can fill out and mail or submit
electronically. There are currently more than 200 employees
within our organization utilizing the system. These include
contributors for our various Web content management systems and
workflow approval managers. By 2009, we expect to have more than
4,000 employees on the system. Beginning with enabling
Lotus Notes End User E-mail Archiving, we will also set up
department-level document management. Overall, we have
significantly improved the quality of our Web content and
reduced the time and resources required to maintain our public
Web sites and our intranet.
Looking Forward
Our Web content management project was the
start of a comprehensive enterprise content management strategy
initiative. Being a large healthcare insurer, we have more than
200 different content repositories technologies with more than
60TB of file data. Our current enterprise systems are cumbersome
and expensive to maintain and in addition, they do not enable
content management from an enterprise level. From the start, we
knew corporate buy-in of this strategy would be critical to
deploying a system that would meet the diverse needs of our
organization. To seek input and build support, we created an ECM
governance committee and executive steering committee that meet
regularly as well as multiple workgroups involving
line-of-business managers.
From an IT perspective, we require a single
content repository technology that easily integrates with the
wide range of applications and content sources that span our
organization, including the company’s third-party portal,
records management and mainframe systems. We reviewed technology
applications from a variety of vendors through a series of
presentations and demonstrations and discovered the Oracle
solution delivers the scalability and functionality we require,
along with comprehensive integration tools.
When fully deployed, our enterprise content
management solution will encompass the full scope of content
found throughout our organization. For example, when an employee
receives an e-mail and declares it as content, we will have the
capability to save the information and store it in the content
management system through integration with Lotus Notes. We will
also manage content for brochures and artifacts for sales
agents, which will go into a print on-demand system.
Our Web content management initiative was the
first step in our efforts to transform the way that we work with
and manage enterprise content at BCBSMN. Success with our Web
project provided a launch pad for our broader vision of creating
a true enterprise content management solution that will drive
improved productivity, knowledge sharing and business
intelligence companywide.
Tom Chaffee is principal operations architect
for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.
Contact him at Tom_Chaffee@bluecrossmn.com.
