Based in Omaha, Neb., Physicians Mutual provides a range of individual health and life insurance products as well as retirement products. The company employs about 1,000 people, including 185 in IT.

When Simpson joined Physicians Mutual in 2001, the company knew it needed to revise its business model to respond to changes occurring in the marketplace and in the regulatory environment. Simpson helped the carrier launch the Greenfield program, a multi-year strategic business transformation initiative that calls for re-engineering core business processes and replacing 40-year-old legacy systems with an SOA-based platform that enables flexibility.

“We came up with an approach to redefine our core business processes around the customer and establish a new technology infrastructure,” Simpson says. “Our approach integrates four threads–people, process, technology, and data–into a cost-effective and flexible new framework.”

To date, Physicians Mutual's agency management and billing and collection applications have been rewritten using J2EE and SOA. The Web-based billing system has helped the company dramatically increase its electronic payments and lower operational costs. Customer service also has seen significant improvements in quality and timeliness. All this helped the carrier win the CIO 100 Award in 2007 from CIO magazine for “operational and strategic excellence in information technology.”

According to Simpson, the company is seeing numerous benefits from work completed on the Greenfield program so far.

“Through reusable software services design, we've been able to cut our time to market by half in some cases from what it would've been,” he says. “We've also had dramatic improvements in providing better information to the business. Our customer service reps now can easily view billing images and a single source of customer information. In some cases, it used to take two to three days to respond to a customer's request, whereas today we can respond in 20 seconds or less.”

For the next 12 to 18 months, Simpson and his team plan to convert legacy data and processes over to the newly installed Greenfield environment as well as implement the Greenfield program's last major phase–a new policy administration system.

“The end result, when you look at the road map, is a cohesive set of software services and applications and the retirement of legacy processes and the mainframe,” says Simpson.

The Greenfield way of working has become so ingrained in the business, according to Simpson, that he can see the Greenfield team moving back into the company's Omaha headquarters without missing a beat.

“We're at the point now where 'the Greenfield way' has made its way back into the home office,” he contends. “I don't mean just the technology; I also mean the methods, practices, and ways of thinking. There's a point at which what we've done on Greenfield becomes the way Physicians Mutual does business. I think we're nearing that point.”

Simpson believes the Greenfield program's success is due to strong senior management support, a well-established strategic transformation plan, and the highly collaborative manner in which the integrated business and IT teams work.

“We have a great team of hard-working business experts and talented IT professionals,” he concludes. “Their synergy is very powerful and great fun to watch.”

Sharon Baker is a freelance business writer based in Charlotte, N.C.