Insurer aims for automation
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida starts with server provi-
sioning on the road to full data center automation.

n By Denise Dubie

After Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida invested $40 million in a new
data center, Paul Stallings began his quest to reduce manual labor,
integrate systems across IT silos and ultimately optimize data-cen-
ter operations through automation.

Stallings, senior manager for provisioning services at Blue Cross Blue Shield in Jacksonville, had dabbled with automation technologies before, but now he wanted a

environment to be consistent and standardized to enable process-oriented automation,” Stallings says.“We have a vision of full automation by enabling integration across multiple systems.”

full-blown implementation.

But first, he needed to establish standard processes and integrate existing tools with the automation software.“We wanted our

Oh no, silos

Another key prerequisite was tearing
down the walls between IT domains and
reducing the human element in many of its
processes. This proved
challenging because
teams at Blue Cross
were accustomed to
operating indepen-
dently when it came to
procuring hardware and
provisioning operating
systems and applica-
tions to new machines
in the data center.

The groups ranged from the data-center team to the platform providers to the network group to the cabling vendor to the operating system staff to storage managers. And that meant it could take up to two weeks to bring in a new machine from the hardware vendor and build a server for the data center. And that was “only if the sun, moon and stars were all aligned correctly,” Stallings says.

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