Ventiv Technology

1 6 | 3SIXTYº Ventiv Technology Shepperson-Turner emphasized the following seven benefits of Aon hosting: 01 EFFICIENCY GAINS "I made the case that going with Aon hosting would make for a more efficient use of our time—of University Risk Management's time," Shepperson-Turner says. "When you have a risk management staff of 14, that's what you do. My job is to be a claims administrator for the University of Colorado; my job is not to be in the software business. My job is not to build tools to do my job; my job is to outsource where it makes sense and choose strong outsourcing partners." 02 IMPROVING ROI FROM iVOS "In 2007, we chose iVOS in large part because there are so many things it can do," Shepperson-Turner recalls. "But if you host iVOS on premises and don't have the support you need, you're likely to miss out on many of those features if they don't come out of the box. For example, I'm talking now with Wayne Bernier about implementing online incident reporting. In theory, it's equally viable with Aon hosting or on-premises hosting. In practice, however, it would be much harder to deploy it if we were still self-hosted; as a result, we would have missed out on some pretty huge process improvements." THE CASE FOR AON HOSTING Thanks largely to her background with a software company, Shepperson-Turner was receptive to the potential value in third-party application and data hosting well before cloud computing became a household term. In the summer of 2011, Shepperson-Turner got in touch with her Aon eSolutions client development manager, Wayne Bernier, and asked him to put together a proposal that she could take to her leadership team. "I knew that in the long run, going with Aon hosting of iVOS and our claims data would benefit our department and benefit the University," Shepperson-Turner says. "I knew that Aon had the resources, the expertise and the right offerings to host our iVOS system more efficiently and more cost-effectively than we could." When Teena Shepperson-Turner joined the University of Colorado Risk Management department as director of claims administration in 2007, she brought extensive experience with IT system conversions from her previous job with a software vendor. That experience was attractive to her new employer. The University had just selected the iVOS claims administration system to replace its in-house database-driven claims system; in addition to applying her experience leading claims administration teams, the University looked to Shepperson-Turner to oversee its upcoming conversion to iVOS. Shepperson-Turner led a smooth conversion process, and iVOS went live in 2008 as an on-premises system hosted by the University's Risk Management department. At the time, the University's iVOS system was supported by an in- house network administrator dedicated to the Risk Management department's systems. A few months after going live, however, the administrator left the University; it was at this point, Shepperson-Turner recalls, that the University's long—but ultimately successful—transition to Aon hosting of its iVOS application and claims data began. As is often the case for departments like Shepperson-Turner's claims administration team, which use locally hosted, specialized technology systems, it can be challenging to get adequate support from the IT department—not because IT staff are unwilling, but for the simple fact that it can be difficult for IT managers to justify devoting the resources required to maintain such specialized systems. "When our administrator left shortly after we went live on iVOS, University Information Services [UIS] stepped in to help, but there was only so much they could offer. UIS support was limited to our server and to keeping the Oracle database up to date," Shepperson- Turner recalls. "They didn't support the iVOS application or anything related to it. The iVOS application was stable, but the problem was, there were times when we needed someone to go into the database and write code to fix a corrupted claim, for example. I couldn't do that because I'm not a programmer. And because we hosted the system ourselves, Aon eSolutions support staff couldn't directly access our systems." Then, in late 2008, Shepperson-Turner began installing system upgrades and a new release of iVOS, supported by a UIS staff member and backed up by Aon eSolutions. Having just started the project, disaster struck: the UIS team member was laid off, and UIS was stretched too thin to assign any new resources to assist Shepperson-Turner. For the next three years, Shepperson-Turner kept the claims administration system up and running. Yet without consistent support, system administration was often stressful and consumed time that Shepperson-Turner knew would have been better spent on claims administration.

• Cover