Achieving Continuous Software Delivery Faster, More Efficiently and With Greater Customer Satisfaction
A national health insurer association, managing the world’s largest privately-held underwritten health insurance contract and the claims and enrollment systems for the largest healthcare insurer of U.S. federal employees, sought to build out an optimized software delivery platform leveraging open source and best-in-class DevOps tools and best practices. xScion enabled the strategy, Proof of Concept (POC) and stakeholder buy-in plan for launching the platform. This platform would allow the customer to launch better quality applications faster and cheaper through automated builds.
The Challenge
The client sought to leverage a DevOps approach to refactor current applications and implement next generational claims technology. In its initial state, the organization lacked process standardization, tools automation and the ability to efficiently scale up or down. They looked to DevOps for its automation capabilities and the convergence between development and operations teams to improve response time for critical services problems and enhance real-time system monitoring. Identifying the best toolchain to fit the technical needs of the customer’s tech stack was the first step in the DevOps journey.
The Change
xScion created the architecture strategy and POC for the implementation of a DevOps approach that would meet the customer’s vision for the future state platform. The business units and use cases that drove maximum business value were identified to gain stakeholder support and client adoption. Those that were most viable were chosen for the DevOps (POC), which led to the initial pilot case and eventually full implementation. Technologies were vetted for integration, deployment and security requirements.
Risks associated with using Open Source applications were identified and assessed. Open Source applications give access to leading edge technology and reduce operating costs, but also require legal and governance approvals to avoid potential pitfalls.
The Value
A strategic business case with initial architectures was built for piloting and ultimately launching a DevOps platform for the next generational claims technology. The customer’s technology teams were coached on how to administer the new platform while use cases to scale the platform were built in conjunction with the customer teams. The DevOps platform will increase performance of the team and organization, with industry averages of 200x more frequent deployments, 24x faster recovery from failures, 3x lower change failure rate and 2,555x shorter lead times, achieving continuous software delivery faster, more efficiently and with greater customer satisfaction.