In addition to offering a viable solution to customer problems, Web self-service also provides the necessary foundation for delivering health plans tailored to individual consumers’ needs?a direction in which the industry is moving to cut managed care costs. (See "CIOs at the Heart of Health-Care Change" at www.cio.com/printlinks.)

But implementing such a sophisticated online system required Ounjian and his staff to overcome some head-scratching hurdles that have hobbled the efforts of national insurers. The difference, Ounjian likes to think, was in the planning. To begin with, he and his staff realized they’d have to lay down a whole new infrastructure, or "chassis" (Ounjian is fond of automotive metaphors), for automating interactions with consumers that had previously taken place over the phone. And in the process of automating transactions, they’d have to devise a sound data management strategy to overcome the problems that arose when they tried to move raw data from back-end systems to the Web front end. If they didn’t come up with a cohesive plan for moving data back and forth, they risked having customers looking at information that was out-of-date, inaccurate, or that varied across the Web and call center channels.

Ounjian says building an online customer self-service system without a data management strategy is like building a bridge without support. "If you don’t have a data management strategy, then you’re only building half the bridge," he says.

The actual infrastructure for BCBS of Minnesota’s website and customer service system is made up of Aspect Communications’ communications platform, Kana’s e-business platform, BEA’s WebLogic application server and Oracle databases. The Aspect platform provides the computer telephony integration, the interactive voice response unit, the Web interaction technology and the queuing engine that directs calls to the appropriate call center agent. In addition to the e-business platform, which integrates with the communications platform from Aspect, Kana provides e-mail management software as well as an application to track communication between call center agents and customers so that BCBS of Minnesota knows who called, when they called and whether their issues were resolved.

Ounjian is using Oracle databases on the front end to reassemble and synchronize back-end data so that consumers find consistent, timely information regardless of whether they use the Web channel or the call center channel. Ounjian says he’s using different vendors for the various components of the Web self-service architecture because there’s no one vendor that supplies everything one needs for an integrated CRM system. He wanted the flexibility to layer different applications and functionality from different vendors on top of his infrastructure.