Innovators Get the Spotlight

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We Do Amazing Things: 2010 Chairman's Award for Excellence

Read the full Summer 2012 issue.

Forward-thinking CIOs are constantly on the lookout for emerging technologies that will help position their organization for growth and performance. Success in business today is tied just as much to the quality of leadership as it is to the ability to keep pace with technological change.

The CSC Award for Excellence recognizes individuals and teams who have created innovative solutions to significantly advance our clients’ business, or our own. These outstanding projects and solutions exemplify the commitment to partnership, excellence and innovation that CSC demonstrates every day.

The 2012 Award for Excellence highlights projects on the cutting edge of hybrid cloud and as-aservice business models, mobile workplaces and complex global engagements.

Here’s what makes these recipients extraordinary:

Accessing Patient Data on Mobile Devices

The CSC Mobility Suite is a prime example of how mobile computing is improving the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare professionals. Enabled by this solution, doctors and nurses at the Cabrini hospital system in Melbourne, Australia, are able to access patient information on their iPads or iPhones. This allows them to review data at a patient’s bedside or access information anytime, anywhere.

CSC technologist Brian Ackland served as the CSC Mobility Suite’s chief architect, leading the code development by tapping into his more than 20 years of healthcare software experience. The key was to provide a simple, clean interface, and doctors at Cabrini have come to love the application.

The CSC Mobility Suite brings together the information doctors need. The solution serves as a proxy to aggregate information from various sources. Patient records are displayed immediately at the simple touch of a screen, and this information is available to all the healthcare professionals involved in the patients’ care.

“The most obvious and immediate benefit we’re seeing is much faster and more convenient access to information for clinical decision making, which means we can provide even better care for our patients and their families,” says Simon Woods, executive director of Medical Services at Cabrini.

Driving a Historic Business Transformation

In the largest-ever business transformation project in the insurance industry, CSC helped China Pacific Insurance Co. (CPIC) migrate data for 115 million policyholders and 170 million insurance policies to a new system. The project consolidated 38 separate life insurance policy systems spread across CPIC’s branches in China into one centralized system. The migration involved 12 terabytes of data clustered on 128 CPUs, and the new system can support up to 80,000 transactions per hour.

The CSC team of Dominic Wong, Feng Rong Zhu, Edison Chiu and Xiao Zhan Zhang helped CPIC create a high-performance IT environment that is enabling the company to improve service, introduce new products faster and compete more effectively. Our financial services team in Asia engaged the CSC Performance Engineering group to devise a new set of architectural strategies, and the units worked together to develop a scalable data warehouse model.

The team then licensed CSC’s FUTUREfirst®/Asia insurance policy administration software and eventually rolled out a first-of-its-kind insurance industry data model. Parallel processing and online data conversion technologies were deployed to accomplish complicated computing tasks simultaneously. In addition to creating a single data source, the deployment of a central data hub reduced architecture complexities and eliminated redundancies.

“The successful implementation of the P10 core business system has enhanced the overall management and innovation capabilities of CPIC,” says Xu Jing Hui, chairman of CPIC. “The centralized management platform will greatly support our front-line sales, extend our service scope and encourage innovation.”

The entire migration program was carried out with minimal disruption to users. Employee access to enterprise data has dramatically improved, and month-end closing processes that used to take up to 10 days can now be completed in less than three hours.

A Mobile Solution for Train Drivers

A CSC-designed system is enabling train drivers in France to use a smartphone to perform essential tasks such as planning routes, driving trains and filing daily reports. CSC developed this mobile solution for the 16,000 train drivers of France’s national state-owned railway company, the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF).

The CSC team tapped into our transportation industry leadership and expertise in mobile applications to build the solution. CSC’s role was to define, design and implement the solution, which is built around a Windows mobile HTC Touch HD smartphone kit, with a rough casting design to fit the train driver’s needs and constraints. Team members included Cécile Anglada, Jérémy Goldschmidt, Christophe Lienhard and Olivier Seka.

The business value the solution brings to the railway includes reductions in operational tasks and error rates, improved distribution of route planning, electronic processing of daily reports and management of critical activity data. The new capabilities have also enhanced the train drivers’ image and pride.

“This solution takes us a major step forward in modernizing the train drivers’ activity, enabling them to better achieve operational excellence in what is becoming a more competitive and challenging environment for SNCF, all the while contributing to sustainable development,” says Jean-Aimé Mougenot, former director of the SNCF train drivers’ human resources department.

The solution is the largest business-to-enterprise mobile project in France that uses only commercially available devices for a mission-critical activity. It also involved many innovations (like using GPS technology) and a major business transformation and business change program.

Changing the Conversation About Private Clouds

CSC BizCloud™ enables organizations in the public and private sector to unlock business and mission value when workloads call for a private cloud. The introduction of BizCloud changed the conversation about implementing a private cloud. Private clouds don’t have to be capital and labor intensive; BizCloud’s new financial model provides the ability to flex up and scale back with efficiency.

BizCloud is a private cloud deployed on the customer’s choice of premises, billed from a rate card and ready for workloads in just 10 weeks. Only CSC offers a cloud solution that combines the agility of an on-premises private cloud with the elasticity of pay-as-you-go pricing associated with public clouds. The CSC team of Sunil Bhargava, Pamela Casale, Gabe Kazarian and Enrique Valencia forged key alliance partnerships to create a standardized delivery model with unique financial engineering so the solution can be deployed quickly with attractive economics.

“BizCloud is ideal for the enterprise cloud — it is scalable, secure and easy to use,” says Bhargava, product director for BizCloud. “The Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer, the rate card and the service levels are the same across all CSC cloud models.” Clients are able to access the right cloud for sensitive workloads, for disaster recovery or backup, or to develop, test and QA applications moving into production. Financial engineering makes it possible to standardize cost across the models.

CSC BizCloud lets customers choose a private cloud without the complexity of traditional models, says Bhargava. “That sounds simple enough, but when you consider the complexity of adding a service catalog, chargeback, orchestration of workstreams or a self-service portal featuring transparency, you realize just what BizCloud provides,” he says. “Sometimes our offer to the market is so simple, it takes a while for prospects to comprehend the incredible value.”

Launching a Federal Cloud
The U.S. government is trying to do more with less. CSC is helping one of our federal clients save money with the deployment of an innovative private cloud that reduces the agency’s development time while increasing scalability.

To trim costs, new federal mandates require government agencies to consolidate their IT assets and embrace cloud computing. CSC’s solution, Development/Test as a Service (DT aaS), is the first federal as-a-service enterprise portal cloud computing solution deployed in a client’s data center that meets the new standards. The initiative combines our long-term government experience with our cloud computing and security expertise, and was made possible by CSC professionals Jerry Bamgbade, Tom Fusting, Jonathan Kronimus and Joe Montione.

The DTaaS solution includes a vertically integrated stack of server, storage, and networking hardware and software to facilitate sharing, reuse and dynamic resource allocation. The environment is based on an x86 VMware, Cisco and NetApp platform. Key features include advanced automation, integrated data protection and an efficient, always-on infrastructure with elastic scalability.

Technology service delivery at the agency has been migrated to a cloud-based, pay-per-use computing environment. Application development and testing activities, previously costly and cumbersome, are now much easier to access and more affordable. DT aaS removes up-front provisioning bottlenecks through self-service provisioning, enabling developers to get to work delivering solutions in less than a day.

“DTaaS provides a common operating, development and testing environment that removes the siloed approach and speeds up the quality and efficiency of the developers by removing the infrastructure concern and allowing developers to do what they do best, which is write code,” says Joe Montione, principal cloud applications architect at CSC.

Enabling Growth for Insurance Companies

CSC financial services professionals recognized the need for a low-cost solution that would let insurance companies enter markets more easily, at a lower cost and with fewer risks. A team of CSC technologists developed Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) for Insurance, which is designed to help companies deploy operations in new markets in record time.

Companies doing business in the workers’ compensation insurance market face a complex maze of regulations that are constantly changing and vary from state to state. Our first BPaaS offering was created to help companies tackle this complex world. Using an innovative delivery model, our Workers’ Compensation as a Service (WCaaS) system can be up and running in just 45 days, and at a fraction of the cost of a typical business process outsourcing arrangement. Team members included Louis Fields, John Husband, Eamon Kelly and Jennifer Kesser.

“Our challenge was to offer a new delivery model that would provide the insurance market with a solution meeting both their business and technological needs,” says Kesser, CSC delivery manager. “With BPaaS, we have taken our core business processes into the cloud.” She says WCaaS takes CSC’s traditional worker’s compensation solution and pre-configures it based on industry standards and state regulatory requirements.

Among the many innovations provided by BPaaS are integrated and pre-populated solutions available in the cloud, a Web-based console to automate client-specific configurations, and transformation of business requirement processes based on standardized configurations. In addition, CSC insurance experts ensure that the system meets the rules and regulations for all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia.

JIM BATTEY is a writer for CSC’s digital marketing team.