Enabling new vision, products with business intelligence

The Discovery Group, a leading health and life insurance provider, is well known for its innovative offerings. Its introduction of a consumer-driven healthcare and wellness model that emphasises lifestyle management revolutionised the South African health insurance industry, and the company has since grown to encompass multiple disciplines.

To enable its new vision and products, and speed of access to new markets, a business intelligence (BI) solution had become essential. As John Robertson, Chief Operations Officer (COO) at Discovery Group, points out, the company has grown and diversified considerably since its inception in 1993.

"Our success lies in our ability to manage the complexities of life insurance and healthcare for customers, helping them cope with risk by pricing products and structuring benefits correctly," he says. "This has seen the launch of new products in overseas markets. However, boosting and enhancing business development is dependent on our ability to analyse data and make informed decisions."

"By 2004, it became apparent that we needed a single BI solution that would provide us with a clearer understanding of our markets and customers, allowing us to offer them a better service and the right products," Robertson explains. "In addition, expansion into global markets drove the requirement for increased corporate governance as we were dealing with a variety of legislation in addition to that applicable to the South African market."

In the US, for example, Discovery`s subsidiary Destiny Health has to adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) that came into force in September 2003 to protect the privacy of individuals` personal health information. At the same time, the Act requires that information be available when needed to provide individuals with services and to monitor, evaluate and improve the health system. This highlighted the need for a proper information distribution system especially as the subsidiary`s back office infrastructure is managed in South Africa.

The challenges Discovery faced included consolidating numerous disparate departmental BI systems and bringing new BI components into the existing, highly complex environment in such a way that they could be seen as an extension of existing systems. The groundwork was laid with development of a data warehouse, with an in-house team of IT professionals gaining considerable proficiency in the development and application of data warehousing methodologies.

Robertson explains: "The data warehouse is the foundation of the BI initiative and we needed infrastructure and technology flexible enough to handle our future business requirements. Today, an operational data store is in place to enable the company to optimally leverage its data."

"We needed a BI solution that could address different issues in different market segments." We were looking for a BI solution that would satisfy our requirements for consistent and reliable information and be capable of addressing the analytic demands of our multi-faceted business. We assessed solutions employed by world leaders in the insurance and banking markets. These are highly competitive and dynamic sectors with a strong focus on governance and confidentiality. Cognos BI offers organisations in these segments the benefits of access to consistent information; the ability to obtain a deeper insight into operations, trends and market shifts and make better informed decisions; and the assurance that information complies with legislation and regulations governing data confidentiality.

Discovery embarked on a proof of concept phase over a six-month period and a decision was taken in December 2004 to deploy Cognos ReportNet for reporting and Cognos PowerPlay for analytics. BI Planning Services (BIPS), a business intelligence solution provider, was appointed to assist with installation and skills transfer to the Discovery IT team. BIPS was selected for its exposure to BI best practices and deep experience in scoping, designing and implementing BI solutions.

As Corniel Lubbe, director at BIPS, explains: "Discovery is highly focused on skills development within its organisation. Rather than outsourcing its requirements directly to BIPS and Cognos, we assisted in training Discovery`s IT team to do the installation, as well as the technical and report authoring."

The BI market is faced with a huge shortage of BI skills so it made sense for Discovery to empower its own staff, who participate in user groups to ensure continual improvement and the acquisition of new skills. The company is now in a position to begin reaping the benefits of the BI solution.

The task for Discovery is to migrate users across operational divisions - HR, finance, etc - to the new system from disparate BI solutions. To do this it needs to deliver the appropriate training and determine and apply standards and best practices for analysis. As Robertson says: "We must make decisions every day in terms of how to improve our products and react to competition. Our aim is to allow our experts to perform the role of analysts using BI to provide consistency of business interpretation."

Future challenges for Discovery include obtaining an expanded view of operations and business dependencies through the implementation of scorecards, the use of metrics and event management, and the creation of dashboards as a foundation for corporate performance management.

The latest release of Cognos, Cognos 8 BI, will be deployed to further enhance the efficiencies and capabilities of Discovery`s BI solution. This will enable operational reporting, greater analysis capabilities, forecasting to support actuarial functions, the measurement of KPIs through scorecarding and business process optimisation through application of event management.

Notes Robertson: "Now that the critical implementation work has been done and the BI architecture is established, we expect fast uptake across the business. The roll-out is highly anticipated as the end-user community was closely involved in the proof of concept phase and has a clear idea of the benefits the BI solution will offer them."

Discovery is already experiencing technical wins in terms of lower support and maintenance requirements, but the real value of the solution will be counted in market share and bottom line success.

Today`s CIOs and business leaders require a BI solution that delivers a complete view of business issues for high value decision-making on a global scale. Enter Cognos 8 BI, the industry`s first solution that delivers complete BI capabilities in a single product, on a single Web services-based architecture.

Cognos 8 BI is a groundbreaking product that addresses this need by providing decision-makers at all levels of the enterprise with a consistent, accurate view of information to better manage performance. As a single product that easily integrates into existing infrastructures with multiple systems and data sources, Cognos 8 BI is a robust technology foundation for BI standardisation and corporate performance management.

Cognos` continual drive toward BI and CPM that knows no boundaries is reflected in their recent positioning as a leader for CPM Suites, 2005, and Enterprise Business Intelligence Suites and Platforms, 2005, in Gartner`s `leaders` quadrant for both 2H04 reports.

Listed on the JSE, the Discovery Group offers a host of revolutionary products, including:

* Discovery Health, consumer-driven private healthcare cover
* Discovery Life, pure-risk life assurance
* Destiny Health, a health cover offering for US customers
* PruHealth, private medical insurance for UK consumers

The scientifically formulated Vitality wellness programme spans these offerings, differentiating them and creating additional value for Discovery members.