A healthcare company in the United States shortens time to market

This company is a not-for-profit healthcare organization in the United States. It has 4,600 employees serving more than 3.7 million customers.

Launching an initiative to accelerate time to market

Time to market is critical within the insurance industry. To stay competitive, this company must be able to quickly respond to changing regulations, create and modify processes and integrate with new business partners. However, keeping up with so many changes can be difficult, particularly considering that the organization includes a number of vertical markets: Healthcare and disease management, claims, financial services, acquisitions, operations, customer services and business transformation. The company also has separate divisions and applications for two key segments: Medicare/Medicaid services; government and commercial services.

To improve its responsiveness and agility, the company launched an initiative to increase consistency, eliminate point-to-point integrations and establish a service-oriented architecture (SOA). An essential part of this initiative involved applying a modeling methodology that the company named M3. By implementing the M3 modeling methodology, it hoped to:

• Apply the fundamentals of model-driven SOA and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to model its enterprise software architecture
• Address growing complexity in enterprise integration architecture and business capabilities
• Support both top-down and bottom-up approaches and improvement management and reuse of architectural models and assets

Choosing IBM Rational

To support its modeling efforts, the company implemented several IBM Rational® applications. One senior application architect at the organization was a strong supporter of choosing IBM Rational applications over competing solutions. “I have been using IBM Rational tools for many, many years. And I have found that Rational products are constantly improving,” says the senior application architect.

The company chose IBM Rational Software Architect software to provide model construction capabilities, IBM Rational Team Concert software to support model lifecycle management, and IBM Rational Asset Manager software to promote model reuse. “We already had Rational Asset Manager software users within the company and a lot of our people have experience with Eclipse-based tools. So this helped streamline the integration of the new Rational tools into our environment,” says the senior application architect.

The Rational applications are integrated, so once models are created in Rational Software Architect software, they are loaded into the Rational Asset Manager repository, where they can be shared and reused. The collaboration capabilities of Rational Team Concert software support team-based modeling, enable early reviews of the developed models and promote greater teamwork.

Greater consistency, shorter time to market

In the past, the company would create models during the development phase. However, since the company lacked a central repository, these models were not always kept up-to-date, which meant that they would sometimes have to be completely reconstructed if the system needed to be updated or replaced. Using the Rational Asset Manager application, the company can store modeling assets in a central repository so they’re easier to access and update. In addition, Rational Software Architect has enhanced modeling consistency. The company’s architects and developers are now using a consistent approach to modeling and a common tool, which makes it easier to share and reuse modeling assets. The Rational solution has improved traceability. By allowing architects to model the as-is architecture of existing systems, they can trace applications and functions back to the requirements and business rules that they’re intended to address.

Having the Rational software, the company is able to bring new employees up to speed much more quickly because information is more consistent and available. So the company can more easily can bring in new designers, developers and architects, and help them become productive in less time.

The M3 modeling initiative is without a doubt a massive undertaking, given the size of the company and the scope and complexity of its applications and systems. So it was essential to have the right tools. “Without the Rational software, this endeavor would have been much more challenging,” says the senior application architect.

For more information

To learn more about how IBM Rational software can help you, contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/rational

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