The Challenge

One of the main objectives was to help Horizon BCBSNJ gain tangible efficiencies in operations, throughout the enterprise and deliver the best possible customer experience. A key fundamental to starting this project on the right path was to engage business units outside of IT early on in the process to determine their true frustrations with requesting services from IT. With this feedback and input, this project started to receive recognition outside of IT and perceived as not just another technical project, but garnered support from their internal customers, the end-users.

As a result, Horizon BCBSNJ developed a self-service catalog that transformed the end-user experience – the theme – bringing services to users’ verses users’ to services. Roles were defined for specific requests so that end-users were presented with requests that were pertinent to their job function and consistent branding was introduced to help support user adoption. In addition, it was important to the company to empower its end-users with statuses of requests, allowing for increased transparency and a natural byproduct – a reduction in call volume to the service desk.

The Solution

Many growing organizations face a common challenge – IT is plagued with legacy systems that create significant costs to maintain and frustrate its end-users by spending time determining which system they should use to submit a basic request.  Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey (“Horizon BCBSNJ”) faced this very challenge. Horizon BCBSNJ’s IT was burdened by legacy systems. Employees struggled to determine which system to use to make basic requests, such as password resets or to initiate the on-boarding process for new employees. To solve this significant challenge, Horizon BCBSNJ’ system required consolidation, and most importantly, a streamlined approach to empower its mobile workforce to find answers.

As a result, Horizon BCBSNJ partnered with Ness to devise a strategy to consolidate multiple legacy systems and develop a front-end self-service catalog to enable employees to order pre-defined, bundled goods and services from not only the IT organization, but other departments beyond IT. The solution – a versatile, cloud-based Enterprise Service Management solution designed to meet the needs of the enterprise not only today, but for long-term growth.