ULLICO Insurance, a fully-unionized provider of multi-line insurance, financial services, and administrative products recently implemented a BPM (business process management) solution to meet its IT business process needs.
In an effort to improve efficiency and reduce cost, ULLICO Insurance, under the leadership of its CIO, James Tierney and its director of enterprise architecture, Melvin Novak, sought to align some of the business processes performed by the IT department with the existing IT infrastructure.
According to this white paper, they aimed to evolve ULLICO’s existing client-server-based application into a more enterprise-based solution that could be utilized by ULLICO’s many lines of business. As a pilot program, ULLICO chose to replace its existing IT ticketing system, a client-server helpdesk expert automation tool called HEAT.
HEAT had several problems that required a structured BPM implementation to solve. It was not user-friendly, difficult to maintain and did not integrate with Active Directory. It was also not extensible, scalable – and it wasn’t web-based.
James and Melvin chose to utilize BPM architecture as a means to align the business needs at ULLICO with the existing IT infrastructure.
Why did they settle on BPM?
Organizational agility, extensibility and interoperability were the major reasons.
So which BPM did they settle on? There are several options out there, but in the case of ULLICO, the company chose Aqualogic BPM, which is now part of the Oracle (News - Alert) BPM suite. Integration was simple -- ULLICO already had a portal system in place which used the Aqualogic UI portal (ALUI, now Oracle Portal).
Aqualogic BPM was chosen for a few other reasons as well. It allows multiple solutions to be deployed beyond the IT ticketing system, provides a centralized security and portal system. It also features a multi-tiered, web-based architecture aimed at streamlining workflow.
The BPM software was designed to be user friendly and easy to use – a must when transitioning from legacy systems. A single sign-on feature through the existing ALUI portal “proved very useful because end-users did not have to remember multiple passwords in addition to their existing corporate account I.D.s.”
While challenges and technical issues arose during the transition, in the end, the BPM implementation made the IT-ticketing system process traceable and visible and allowed for more accountability.