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In the Cuckoo's Nest

I recently spent time with a client that is in the final stages of selecting a claims administration system. The client needed to answer four questions posed by the company's executive management: Who

By George Grieve | Updated on July 31, 2008

I recently spent time with a client that is in the final stages of selecting a claims administration system. The client needed to answer four questions posed by the company’s executive management: Who (which vendor)? How (implementation approach)? How long (implementation time line)? How much (cost and payback)? My involvement at the time was with the “How?” To this end, I participated in “Road Map” meetings with IT staff and business people to understand where the claims system implementation would fit in the corporate timetable and how to structure the software rollout in order to minimize duplication of effort and disruption to the claims operation. Everything went swimmingly well until we hit the issue of data conversion.

Data conversion is that dangerous place inside a “package” implementation project where, if you are not careful, you give birth to a runaway, one-off, throw-away development effort that, like the cuckoo, grows way too big for the project’s nest. Here is the basic problem: It is perfectly reasonable for a claims manager, when participating in the planning of a multimillion-dollar claims system replacement project, to assume when the project is done all the open and closed claims actually will be in the new system, put there by smart IT people writing the necessary code to move them over. What could be more reasonable than that?

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