InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
July 20, 1998
Unified Front
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LaunchPad, in conjunction with a large imaging network implemented with the help of Eastman Software, also lets Prudential management keep closer tabs on the sales practices of those agents by automating and keeping records of every customer interaction. The contact information and all underwritten policies are stored and updated daily or weekly so that managers have access to current records electronically.
As part of LaunchPad, all the insurance agencies are being equipped with Ethernet LANs; previously, the agencies relied on paper trails and leased-line access to Prudential's mainframes to send and receive updates about policy information. Reconstructing the history of a policy was cumbersome.
The lack of such electronic oversight arguably has cost Prudential more than $2 billion since 1996. That's the amount it has shelled out to settle a class-action lawsuit and other claims related to charges that Prudential Insurance agents misled and defrauded customers with such practices as "churning," or using the cash value of existing policies to finance new, often unnecessary policies. Compensation is still being pursued by policyholders who didn't join the class-action suit.
Benchmarks by Gartner Group Inc. also show a weakness in Prudential's ability to track its IT assets--a problem slated to be rectified by the implementation later this year of Tangram Enterprise Solution's Asset Insight software to keep tabs on the insurer's desktops and year 2000 compliance.
Overall, Prudential devotes considerable resources to benchmarking the cost-effectiveness of its technology projects. "They've put a tremendous focus on moving toward best-in-class performance for IT," says Gartner Group VP Mike Bitterman, who oversees the Prudential work. "It's an absolute mandate today that they become a world-class IT provider. It's seen as an integral part of making the organization successful."
Call Consolidator
One of the company's most ambitious projects is the Business Operations Center, a virtual call center that will consolidate the 100,000 customer calls a week to Prudential Insurance's three centers, in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Jacksonville, Fla.
The first phase, which began in April, standardized the procedures in all three centers. The second phase, which began this month, launched an intelligent call-routing system from GeoTel. This directs calls to one of 805 service representatives at the three locations based on a rep's business or customer specialty, replacing a labor-intensive manual system of allocating calls among sites based on the caller's geographic location. The GeoTel system will link to Prudential's Tivoli Systems network-management system, which will automatically reroute calls around infrastructure problems.
Push technology is being used to deliver daily scorecards to the desktops of call-center staffers. Management information reports are also sent out to call-center supervisors on a daily, weekly, and quarterly basis. In the fourth quarter, Prudential plans to make the electronic "ticker" that tracks calls--now available overhead at every call center--available on desktops as well.
Call-center supervisors can already monitor how Prudential customers are being handled and whether enough reps are on hand. A longer-term goal is to segment and route high-income and certain other kinds of customers to specific groups of representatives for targeted selling across all of Prudential's business units. "Everything we do we want to be transferable across the enterprise," says David Bechtold, a director of the call center.
Company Standards
In keeping with the One Prudential mantra, the company is standardizing on hardware and software companywide. Unix-based IBM and Sun Microsystems machines run high-end server applications, while IBM, Compaq, and Hewlett-Packard are the lower-end servers and PCs of choice. Prudential is standardizing on IBM software, having picked Lotus Notes for E-mail and groupware, Tivoli TME 10 for enterprise management, and IBM DB2 for databases. It also uses Sybase's relational database.
Prudential is standardizing its 70,000 desktops on Windows NT Workstation. Netscape Navigator is currently the company's standard Web browser, but Prudential plans to move to Microsoft Internet Explorer. Geac SmartStream is used for financial applications; Prudential will install PeopleSoft for payroll next year. About 70% of Prudential's network traffic runs over IP, and that percentage is growing.
In Prudential's four data centers reside 19 ES/9000-compatible CPU hosts, from IBM, Hitachi Data Systems, and Amdahl, that run key applications such as record-keeping. Prudential has no plans to phase out its mainframes, preferring instead to make host systems accessible via the Web and other GUIs. "Our strategy is to embrace and extend the mainframe as long as it's accessible and has good price/performance," Friel says. "For the volume of transactions we need, client-server just doesn't have the horsepower."
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