SOA TRANSFORMATION
In the past, Unum's products and services were created and supported with their own systems, business processes, and business organizations. Processes and data involved with product offerings were handled in separate silos and often required manual intervention and paperwork.

To recast this model, Unum moved to SOA, crossing functional and product-line boundaries and focusing on the full customer experience, says Owen. The project required a holistic approach dependent on integrating five workflows, 100 actions, 15 business services, more than 300 service operations, and more than 25 legacy systems.

Key technologies involved in the SOA-fueled business transformation include Tibco iProcesses for workflow and Tibco iProcesses Decision for process rules; Exstream Dialogue for building and deploying high-volume, on-demand interactive document applications; and Microsoft BizTalk to share business functions and aggregated services with workflow and the mainframe.

A rules engine provides a repository of rules that can be reused so that when new products are offered, the business rules for them come from the same rules engine used for other sorts of coverage. "The tools allow us to adapt into the future, rather than reinventing the wheel every time Unum provides a new product or service to the market," says Rick Klausner, VP of IT enterprise architecture.

Before Simply Unum, it took three to eight weeks from the time the company gave a price quote to when it issued a policy; now it takes as little as a week, Klausner says.

TOP-LEVEL BACKING

Senior management, including the company's CEO and board of directors, stood behind Simply Unum throughout the project and celebrated with the project teams as they met key milestones. During the process, Unum's business staff learned about how the technology would facilitate the changes, and the IT team learned a lot about the inner workings and workflow of the business.

The biggest challenge in the initiative has been the need for cultural change. It was a "radical shift," Owen says, with a significant amount of time spent on change management. "When you ask people to change, there's got to be a legitimate business need," she says.

Owen knows the ins and outs of Unum well since she's been with the company 32 years, starting as a programmer and moving up the ranks in a variety of IT and business-related positions. She was named CIO late last year.

Throughout the planning and development process for Simply Unum, the company held several "simulation events," where employees took part in role-playing activities, taking on the roles of brokers, plan administrators, and other customers to work out the kinds of questions and concerns that might come up. "As you change a business model," Owen says, "the challenge is how to get people to understand and move in that direction as well."

That appears to be what has helped Unum move beyond SOA's challenges and enabled it to reap significant rewards.