By Kim Girard
Network World, 01/04/99

Prudential Insurance Company of America's IT mission comes straight from the top: Move away from mainframes and overhaul the network to use technology as a competitive advantage.

Integral to this effort are two large-scale deployments that have required nearly $103 million in investments for the Newark, N.J., insurance giant. Prudential is rolling out a new IP network to support 12,000 geographically dispersed workers, and the firm recently opened a centralized management hub to track its worldwide IT infrastructure. Prudential's massive technology investment and resulting payoff earned an honorable mention in Network World's 1998 User Excellence Award competition.

LaunchPad

Using technology as a springboard to increase sales and improve customer service, Prudential's LaunchPad initiative has armed sales agents with IBM ThinkPad notebook computers and all the applications and tools they need to do their jobs effectively. The rollout necessitated a network overhaul in 600 insurance offices across the country.

From Bob Piccirillo's perch as a vice president of field technology at Prudential in Roseland, N.J., the job of planning the LaunchPad deployment has been similar to choreographing a ballet. On any given day, 100 offices are in various stages of network installation.

All it takes is one misstep and the subcontrators' schedules are botched. Sometimes employee counts for a site are incorrect, so wiring needs to be changed on the fly. Other days, the phone companies run late or don't show up at all.

In order to keep on top of things and track the work orders for every router, cable, switch, wire and hub, Piccirillo built a database and designed a standard method for installing all network equipment, from the telephone wiring to the docking stations.

Larger field sites are outfitted with Cisco routers and Ethernet switches, along with fractional T-1 access and ISDN backbones. Smaller field offices have analog connections to the corporate WAN.

Since February, Prudential has rolled out some 7,000 notebooks and has trained about 1,000 employees per month. Workers use their new ThinkPads to access e-mail, the intranet and the Internet, and to download insurance applications and forms. The rollout is slated for completion in March 1999.

Most of the agents in field offices use docking stations to access the Prudential network, but 3,000 employees who work exclusively from their homes and the road dial in to IBM's Advantis network to connect to the company WAN. Prudential contracted IBM to manage the dial-up service and to field help desk calls pertaining to Lotus Notes and IBM hardware.

Before Prudential implemented LaunchPad, agents dialed in to the corporate mainframe via leased lines to access client and policy information. Agents didn't have a shared e-mail system or the ability to download marketing documents and insurance policy applications, so they wasted a lot of time conducting paper correspondence and hunting down forms.

Without a standard hardware and software platform, it was also difficult for Prudential to develop applications that were compatible with the agents' PCs. "They called in with all sorts of problems and questions, and we had to be knowledgeable about all of them," Piccirillo says. Now that support costs have been reduced, the IT department can concentrate on developing sales software.

Quick payback

The $100 million LaunchPad project should pay for itself within two years, and it could possibly pay off in just one, says Roy Schwartz, a vice president of field technology at Prudential. The rollout is already helping the company sell itself to recent college graduates and top-tier job candidates who are demanding modern technology, he says.

The project is also boosting insurance agent retention because some workers view LaunchPad as the company's commitment to their careers and professional development.

"The four-year cost of replacing an agent is $250,000," Schwartz says. "If we can keep 400 agents from leaving, we pay for the entire program."

Insurance agents who piloted the technology reported a 153% increase in sales results, but that improvement may only be partly attributable to the new system, Schwartz says. "Giving agents the latest technology makes them want to work harder," he says.

Operations Control Center

The other component of Prudential's network infrastructure improvement is the Operations Control Center (OCC), which opened in August. Located in Roseland, the OCC provides 24-7 IT monitoring and support for 800 sites around the globe under one roof. Working during three shifts, 55 IT professionals use the OCC to track all of the company's networks, operating systems, servers, databases and LAN equipment.

"When you have to manage an IT infrastructure as complicated as Prudential's, you need a single point of accountability," says Mohammed Mosaad, vice president of corporate technology services at the company. When problems affect multiple systems today, the OCC has the expertise and tools to fix the systems fast. It can even prevent some problems from occurring in the first place, he says.

Prudential uses the Tivoli NetView interface for the Tivoli TME 10 management console to alert IT employees of immediate network problems and failures. The OCC uses Accessible Software's proprietary tool AccessOne to monitor the mainframe environment, enabling administrators to track multiple mainframe applications on one screen. Cisco's CiscoWorks network management software monitors and controls any SNMP devices on the network, while Platinum Technology's ServerVision provides alert management and automated problem correction for Unix servers.

Many of the network management tools used in the OCC, including Tivoli's, were already installed in different divisions of Prudential and have proven effective, says John Andolino, vice president of technology. Since moving toward a distributed computing environment, the company has migrated toward Tivoli as the focal point for management.

Before the OCC was built, Prudential's IT workers were frustrated when they couldn't easily manage a problem that required help from different IT support groups and engineering groups located throughout the corporation.

For example, if a LAN in the Newark office crashed overnight, the problem might have gone undetected until users reported the outage in the morning. Support technicians in Newark would investigate the problem and pass it along to another IT group if they couldn't fix it themselves. That could take several hours. Now the OCC detects the problem, coordinates troubleshooting and often corrects glitches before they affect users.

Here's how the OCC works: Initially, one of the management systems alerts a first-level support person to a problem. If the problem seems complex, a problem manager is assigned and coordinates help from other support workers and engineers until the problem is solved.

In its first few months of operation, the OCC has already detected many network failures overnight and has fixed them before morning. This has improved productivity across the corporation. Moreover, the OCC has helped motivate IT workers.

"Now employees are excited to work with people to solve problems and own the problem from start to finish," Andolino says.

The OCC also enables Prudential to shift network resources whenever there's a crisis. For example, when a hurricane in the South recently threatened a central call center, the company prepared to shift all calls and applications to the Northeast. All network resources and data transmissions could have been moved on the fly as well.

While it's too soon to measure return on investment, Prudential is already reporting service improvements, as measured by shorter mean times between failures and total outage times. Mosaad says server availability has also improved, although it's hard to directly attribute that benefit to the OCC.

Overall, Prudential expects the $2.85 million OCC to save money by consolidating IT management and avoiding overlapping labor costs. "Client-server is expensive to maintain, but we expect this to lower the cost of ownership in the long run," Andolino says.