This is the presentation delivered at the 2009 IBM Portal Excellence Conference. The topic is Zero to Production in 6 Months: A Blue Cross Blue Shield Case Study.

1. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009
San Diego, California - October 12 – 15, 2009 ®
Session S14
Zero to Production in Six Months
A Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida Portal Success Story
Speakers:
Lisa Crawford, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida
Glenn Kline, Perficient, Inc. glenn.kline@perficient.com
© IBM Corporation

2. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Agenda
Introduction and Overview
The Challenge we Faced
Where we were
Where we had to go quickly
What did we do and what did we deliver
The 5 Most Important Success Factors to us
5 Pitfalls we avoided
2

3. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Blue Cross Blue Shield of FL (BCBSF)
Overview
Largest health insurance provider in FL with over 4 million members
All lines of business serve almost 8 million members
Offers a wide array of benefits
Health plans
Life
Dental
Medicare
Owns several subsidiaries
Availity, LLC
Navigy, Inc
Novitas Health
3

4. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
The Challenge – Where we were
June, 2008
Java servlet based site originally developed in 2002
Function, but brittle platform
Business rules burned into code
No content management
One functional change could break some thing completely different
Site was difficult for users to use
Expensive and slow to make changes
Could not respond quickly enough to business needs
Platform could not respond to business demands without major code
deliverables
4

5. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
5

6. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
The Challenge – Where we needed to go
By Early December, 2009
Needed to modernize the user interface
Needed new “look and feel”
More importantly, needed a design centered around members
Needed to deliver new capabilities
Personalized member dashboard on the home page
Targeted messages
Integrated health statements
Business user friendly content management
Plus much more
Needed to integrate with many internal services
Needed to integrate with external vendors and partners
The member constituency is the most important BCBSF group
6

7. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
The Solution – WebSphere Portal
Early December, 2009
Scalable, robust, and reliable robust delivery platform
Many industry solutions have been deployed on WebSphere Portal
Have the support of IBM and Perficient
Out of the box capabilities facilitated speed to market
Lotus Web Content Management
Personalization Engine
Security
Navigation
UI customization
Speed to market - provided a flexible delivery platform
Decoupled different systems from each other
Could deploy individual portlets separate from major releases
Can keep the portal up when dependent systems are unavailable
7

8. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
8

9. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
9

10. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas

11. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Just Some of what BCBSF has Today
Claims Care Programs Enrollment
Benefits Single Sign On – Internal Systems
HSA Balance from ACS Mellon Flexible Spending Account
Integrated Content Managed by LWCM Pay Bill
Plans and Products Single Sign On – External Partners
Forms Web MD
Glossary / FAQs ACS Mellon
Much more Health Dialog
Portal Personalization Prime Therapeutics
iLog Business Rules Driven Targeted Messages Pharmacy Shopping Tool
Compare prices at multiple pharmacies
Secure Message Center
Recommend generic and therapeutic
Plan Shopping
alternatives
Member Emulation for Print and Request Benefit Booklet
Customer Service Representatives
Print and Request ID Cards
Benefits Administrators
Member Health Statements
Care Coordinators
11

12. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
External Partner Integrations
Single Sign On (Dec 2008)
Display HSA balance in MyBlueService using WebServices
from ACS Mellon (April 2009)
Single Sign On (Dec 2008)
Drug Pricing Tool using WebServices supplied by Prime
Therapeutics (Dec 2008)
Single Sign On (Dec 2008)
Single Sign On (April 2009)
Secure Messaging using WebMD Web
Services (December 2009)
12

13. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Customer Testimonials and Adoption
Adoption and Usage
MyBlueService usage has increased over 30% since moving to portal
The average day brings over 4,000 unique visitors with peak days over
8,000
85% customer satisfaction rate and rising
Customers are using the portal and saving money
Customer Quotes
“The Pharmacy Shopping Tool saved me almost $200 on a prescription”
“The new design is great! It is much easier to use.”
“I saved over $2000 on my knee surgery with the CareComparison tool.
13

14. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
And how we got there in 6 months
14

15. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Success Factor #1
People, Processes and Technology - The Holistic Approach
15

16. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
SiteMinder SSO and
LDAP Consumer
Web Sales
Shopping
Customer
Information Database
Secure
Message
Center
Personalized
Navigation
Personalized Offers from
iLog and LWCM
Accumulators from
Recent Claims from Benefits System
Claims System
WebTrends Tracking
16

17. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Success Factor #2
Dependency Management
Portal is all about integrating the many moving parts
Internal teams
External teams
Security
Infrastructure
Legal and Compliance
And more
Must understand all the dependencies and get them aligned
Know the critical path dependencies and manage closely
Manage scope accordingly if dependencies slip
At BCBSF to date
12 different internal teams have been involved
4 external partners have been involved
17

18. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Success Factor #3
Design with the Users for the Users
You cannot create an exceptional user experience without involving the users
Engage users early in the user experience (UX) design process
Information Architecture
3x3 paper prototyping
High fidelity design
High Fidelity Prototyping
UEX Testing
Engage the business
Solution must implement the business needs and objectives
Engage the technical team early in the UX design process
Prevents UX from designing something which cannot be implemented
Allows UX team to understand capabilities they may not have known they
had
This process does not end after the first release
18

19. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Success Factor #3
Design with and for the Users
19

20. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Success Factor #4
Use an Experienced Core Team
Need to know how to navigate the people, processes, and technology
Know the business
IT driven requirements never deliver what the business wants
Educate the business on the capabilities portal provides
Know the technology
Understand what the technology can provide
Have all the roles covered
Development
Infrastructure and Administration
Deployment
Security
Services
And more
20

21. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Success Factor #5
Pick the Right Portal Partner
Experience
Demonstrated they have done it before under pressure
References
Need a strong working relationship
Being able to work within your culture and processes
Blended client / customer teams are your best chance of success
Cater responsibilities to individual strengths
Clearly define roles and responsibilities
Partner to the end solution
Portal Methodology
Understands the holistic approach you must take with portal solutions
Sample effective artifacts and deliverables
Need someone who understands the technology
Understand all the capabilities portal provides to architect and implement the right
solution
Has done it before
21

22. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Pitfall #1
You do not Leverage Capabilities the Portal Technology Provides
Portal capabilities may not be perfect for your needs but they are usually better
than building it yourself
Personalization
Web Content Management
Web Application Integrator
Collaboration
If you try to change how portal fundamentally works, you will struggle
Themes and skins are meant to be customized
The WCM authoring portlet is not
BCBSF Example – how we avoided
Did not use Stellent and chose LWCM
Leveraged the Personalization engine extension points for navigation and portlet
visibility
Used the Web Application Integrator to increase speed to market
22

23. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Pitfall #2
Failure to Empower the Team
Team leads need decision making authority
Don’t have a meeting to just decide you need to have a meeting
If leaders “in the trenches” need to escalate to manager or director level with each
decision, nothing will ever get done on time
Technical development team must have access to environments
WAS/Portal administrators are never 100% dedicated
They usually don’t know how the application really works
A development team waiting around for a simple task to be completed wastes time and
$$$$
BCBSF Example – how we avoided
Perficient produced a recommended set of privileges for lead portal developers and why
they needed it
Portal delivery leadership met with infrastructure and negotiated a middle ground that
granted access in lower environments while protecting the integrity of stage and
production environments.
23

24. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Pitfall #3
Lack of Solid Technical Project Management for Portal
How to fail when managing a portal project
My job definition is to get a report and summarize it in another report
My job is to make a list of all the risks and put them on a piece of paper
My job is to make a list of issues and put them on a piece of paper
My job is to hold a weekly meeting and present my pieces of paper
My job is to have a developer tell me of an issue on Thursday and assign
someone to address it when I create my status report on Monday
I’m a Project Manager, it’s the process rather than the end goal or the
technology that’s important
Aside from some spiffy PM tools and a cool certificate on the wall, a good admin
could do my job………………………..
24

25. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Pitfall #3
Lack of Solid Technical Project Management for Portal
A good project manager is worth his or her weight in gold: pay accordingly
A good project manager
Sits with architects and developers over lunch
Understands the technology well enough to understand the dependencies
Can you create a page on the portal?
Can you set security?
Can you place portlets?
Do you know the general approach to integration?
Do you know the general approach to content management?
Acts immediately on issues with dependencies
Is forward looking and ensures deliverables and key technology is ready before
developers start working on them.
Can translate a developer issue to a business language
Isn’t afraid to act like a Business Analyst if the need is there
Uses the collaboration tools, project spaces, etc. to their best advantage
BCBSF Example – how we avoided
We ran into this problem and were not afraid to make a resource change
25

26. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Pitfall #4
Choosing the Wrong Implementation Technologies
This is what we’ve always done and what we know, so try to use it
This is what everyone else is using
While it is usually best to follow industry trends, your needs may differ
JSF vs Struts vs Spring MVC for user interfaces
Trying to make portal fit into your existing technologies and processes
without adapting them
BCBSF Example – how we avoided
Chose to use LWCM for web content even though Stellent was in house
Did a 180 switch and chose Spring MVC after starting with JSF and
experiencing great pain
26

27. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Pitfall #5
Underestimating the People, Processes and Technology
Enough time is not left for performance testing
6-8 weeks for first round of performance testing
Long term soak tests
Performance Tuning
LWCM and PZN optimizing
Limit the calls on the main page
Do not have experienced portal administrators
Developers should not have to tell administrators how to perform tasks
Administrators should be able to troubleshoot and resolve problems
Underestimating production support
Production support is time consuming and can have a negative perception
Developers should not also be the frontline for production support
Release management is complex
Build and deploy process is complex
Must coordinate content, services, security, infrastructure, and portal simultaneously
BCBSF Example – how we avoided
Went through an extensive load testing and performance tuning process
Brought in highly skilled dedicated portal administrators at critical times
Adapted to the processes
Very committed blended team
27

28. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Summary
Success Factors Pitfalls
People, Processes and Technology - You do not Leverage what the Portal
The Holistic Approach Technology Provides
Design with the Users for the Users Failure to Empower the Team
Dependency Management Lack of solid technical project
Use an Experienced Core Team management for portal
Pick the Right Portal Partner Choosing the Wrong Implementation
Technologies
Underestimating the People,
Processes and Technology
28

29. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Additional Information and Resources
Corporate Site - http://www.bcbsfl.com
My Blue Service - https://mwe.bcbsfl.com/wps/portal/mbs/
Corporate Site - http://www.perficient.com
Portal Blog - http://blogs.perficient.com/portals/
29

30. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
About Perficient
Leading Technology Consulting & Solutions Firm
Founded in 1997; Publicly traded.
$231MM+ in annualized 2008 Revenue
Over 1,400 highly-experienced Consultants
18 Locations across North America
80+% of Revenue from recurring Clients
Served over 400 Clients in past 12 months
Software Solutions Expertise, including:
Enterprise Portals & Content Management
SOA, EAI and BPM
e-Commerce and Product Information Mgmt
Business Intelligence/ETL
Customer Relationship Management/CDI
User Experience/UCD
Key Differentiators
Focused expertise, lower cost, faster time-to-value
IT Solutions with Business Focus
National consultants overlay Local delivery model
Mature, proven Project Methodology
Global Development Centers in China & Europe
IBM’s largest Software Services Partner in U.S.

31. IBM Portal Excellence Conference 2009 – Americas
Perficient’s IBM Partnership
“ ”
!"
#$ % & '#
( $ )
“*+# ” , #& -
( $ & '# # . /#
00
12
23 $ 4
12
25 12 (
26 $ 4
#&
# # (“)
# ” 00 '
#
#)
# ## $
7 $ 87
# % )
! "