Insurer aims for automation

After Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida invested $40 million in a new data center, Paul Stallings began his quest to reduce manual labor, integrate systems across IT silos and ultimately optimize data-center operations through automation.

Stallings, senior manager for provisioning services at Blue Cross Blue Shield in Jacksonville, had dabbled with automation technologies before, but now he wanted a full-blown implementation.

Click to see: Paul Stallings, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida

But first, he needed to establish standard processes and integrate existing tools with the automation software. "We wanted our environment to be consistent and standardized to enable process-oriented automation," Stallings says. "We have a vision of full automation by enabling integration across multiple systems."

Oh no, silos

Another key prerequisite was tearing down the walls between IT domains and reducing the human element in many of its processes. This proved challenging because teams at Blue Cross were accustomed to operating independently when it came to procuring hardware and provisioning operating systems and applications to new machines in the data center.

The groups ranged from the data-center team to the platform providers to the network group to the cabling vendor to the operating system staff to storage managers. And that meant it could take up to two weeks to bring in a new machine from the hardware vendor and build a server for the data center. And that was "only if the sun, moon and stars were all aligned correctly," Stallings says.

To streamline the provisioning process, Stallings first worked to establish a team dedicated solely to that task. This new team handles requests for new infrastructure and manages applications for all groups. Within this division of Blue Cross, which serves about 4 million members and employs about 11,000 people, Stallings' group represents "a small footprint" with about five staff members responsible for managing and automating the provisioning of new servers. Now, Stallings explains, any request for servers goes through his team.

"The one provisioning services team is responsible for all infrastructure and hardware, which makes it easier to track what is coming in and when it's going live," he says.