This is indeed one of the individuals in the market who has placed this mega company, Blue Cross and Blue Shield on the cutting edge relative to the age of automation.
Re: Insurer aims for automation.
Mr. Paul Stallings in truly one of the country's foremost authorities in his field, however not always having been recognized as such. I would like to applaud the magazine, Network World, for having the insight in discovering this technological giant in the midst of ever changing field.
Walter Gulley, Jr.
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Now the rest of the story
There is no magic bullet, the road to automation has MANY, MANY pot holes. While we are on our way, we need a fleet of huge truckloads of asphalt to fill in the holes we still have in his processes.
Good luck
That is the right way but they need both determination and luck. And most important, what they seem to have, the top management support.
I have done that in about same size company and I thought of a couple of things which were not mentioned in article, probably they do those but anyway. First, get a capacity planning person involved from beginning, this gets very important once the new systems get running and more so later on. Security of course. And "five staff members responsible for managing and automating the provisioning of new servers" - I would have a group which is responsible of not just the hw but really everything, see the capacity planning and security. Otherwise there will be many inside fights over the priorities and that can slow down or even destroy the whole good idea. I have seen that happening!
Anyway, it is good to see that more and more the companies (and government, see VA stories even if they goofed a little) start understanding that you can distribute the IT but not the control and responsibility, too many chefs or what they say..
An afterthought, he is right that today it takes forever to get hardware, etc. What has changed? There was a time when we got two huge airplanes full of systems on Friday evening and everything was running on Monday morning 8am, country wide banking systems, a building worth of equipment! Is it a planning problem, I don't know?