Anania says the back-end data problems have since been fixed. "We slowed down the pace of migration and shored up those processes around the conversion of customer data," she says. Her IT team also instituted more thorough testing practices and brought in more experienced managers to monitor the project. The CIO of Cigna HealthCare, Meg McCarthy, who was hired by Anania, has been let go, as has the IT manager directly in charge of transformation, Hayward Donagan. Both women declined to comment for this article, saying they had signed nondisclosure agreements upon leaving Cigna.

Post-Mortem: A Hard Lesson Learned

In July 2002, Cigna was able to move additional members to the new platforms without major incident, and in January 2003 it successfully migrated another 700,000 members. The company also launched MyCigna.com, an online portal where Cigna members can look up their benefits, choose from an array of health plans, check on the status of their claims, retrieve health information and talk to nurses online. While some members have complained of difficulty in getting onto the personalized portal, Anania and others point to MyCigna as an example of a successfully implemented technology-based project.

Cigna officials now say that despite the initial problems, the transformation project is allowing the company to process medical claims more efficiently and better manage customers’ needs. In January, the insurer announced it was cutting another 3,900 positions as part of a "streamlining" of Cigna’s sales force and medical management team. A spokeswoman said the new IT systems have enabled that downsizing by eliminating duplication in claims processing and billing.

Recent customer satisfaction surveys conducted by Cigna show that 83 percent of existing members are satisfied with the service they get, compared with 58 percent earlier in the year. The project, however, will well exceed its original $1 billion price tag, according to Anania. Cigna officials decline to put a number on the extra cost.

Anania says there have been a number of lessons from the missteps of the past year (see "Lessons Learned," opposite page), among them the need for strong IT governance.

"We moved 20 experienced application developers into the project," she says. Translation: Cigna is relying less on its name-brand systems integrator?CGEY?and more on its own IT systems staff to manage the project. (For more on bringing project management in-house, see "It’s Time to Take Control," at www.cio.com/printlinks.)

Anania, however, seems reluctant to centralize the governance of IT to too great an extent. "At the end of the day, you have to strike the right balance between central IT authority and strong functional guidance that’s aligned with the business," she says.