Williams Co. Improves Claims IT Support and Achieves Independence with Assistance from CSC’s Hosting Services

The Williams Company, a leading U.S. natural gas company, deals with a variety of risks every day. Along with that business come property-damage claims and subrogation cases associated with pipeline construction and operation.

Williams had been using a risk management information system in 1980, but by 1999, with the new millennium fast approaching, Williams needed to replace its aging AS/400 hardware and software with a Y2K-compliant platform. The Tulsa, Okla.-based company reviewed several risk management and claims systems on the market and chose CSC’s RISKMASTER. The new system ran on a Windows NT server, making it easier to maintain, and the claims staff converted from green screen terminals to RISKMASTER’s Windows-style graphical user interface and navigation.

Transferring Duties to CSC’s Hosting Services

What happened next, however, would have been difficult for any IT manager to predict. Over the next few years, Williams underwent a significant restructuring. Portions of the business were divested and a number of in-house services including IT support were outsourced to third parties.

“It was a big change for us, because without our own IT staff, suddenly we had to follow certain internal protocols whenever we needed to make updates to RISKMASTER,” recalled Janet O’Neal, Williams’ systems coordinator. “It was a matter of priorities and unfortunately we would sometimes have to wait. We also had to train newly hired support staff how to support our system.”

In 2004, when it was time to upgrade the system, O’Neal urged the company to talk to CSC about hosting the system and infrastructure at CSC’s data center. All responsibilities for maintenance and upgrades were later transferred to CSC.

“If there’s a problem, I just have to make a phone call to CSC and I know I’m going to get it solved,” O’Neal said. “Who better to take care of the system than the people who know the system?”

Groundwork for the Future

CSC created a custom Web application that allows Williams’ staff to handle their own monthly uploads of claims data to a third-party administrator (TPA), eliminating a time-consuming method of sending the data directly from one FTP site to another.

“One thing I like about working with CSC is I can tell them, ‘Here’s my problem. What can you do for me?’” O’Neal said. “They have always solved my problems. We have been relieved from having to worry about IT, which allows us to focus on claims. So, CSC is a big plus.”

The next step in Williams’ journey from the mainframe to server-based to Web-based processing will be the company’s upgrade to RISKMASTER X, the first fully browser-enabled version of the system. RISKMASTER X will allow Williams to communicate directly with other Web-based applications.

“We’re really excited about RISKMASTER X,” O’Neal said. “It will allow us to change the screen layout and put the functions in the order that we want. It opens a whole new door for us.”

Support When Disaster Strikes

The application-hosting arrangement with CSC was challenged twice in 2005 during a general power outage and later a flood caused by a city water-main break. The potentially disruptive events demonstrated the value of hosting data off-site.

“The power outage knocked out everything but our hosted RISKMASTER system,” O’Neal said. “Our IT staff had to rebuild a lot of systems, but we never lost RISKMASTER. As long as we had Internet access, we could work from home.”

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