A Portal to the Land of OZ

OZ improving corporate vitality with the SAS Information Delivery Portal

OZ zorgverzekeringen (OZ) is one of the larger regional health insurance companies in The Netherlands. Employing about 600 people, OZ serves 580,000 public and 30,000 private insurees from its head office in Breda and offices throughout the country's southwest.

In 2002 the company investigated how to improve its information management with a view to increasing profitability. At the time, OZ distributed information through a variety of methods (intranet, e-mail and hard-copy reports) and had a portal-like environment managed through Lotus Notes, giving access to some 20,000 static Web pages.

OZ had already been a SAS user organization for many years, having built the corporate data warehouse in SAS. SAS reporting on this data warehouse enables OZ's middle managers to monitor the progress of the business on a departmental level, and gives the CEO and other senior managers analyses of the company's profitability by region, by policy, by contract and so on. By 2002 OZ was distributing reports through some 200 SAS/IntrNet applications, and ran approximately 50 SAS programs that distributed information via e-mail. A further 25 SAS applications generated hard-copy reports.

"Reporting in SAS is key to running our organization, but in these days of information overload you can never be sure that people are focusing on the reports and information that are critical to the performance of their specific roles and functions," says Erwin van Dongen, Manager of the Kenniscentrum (Knowledge Centre) at OZ. "We had done what we could to make information access more appealing through an intranet site, but the problem was that the users themselves could not customize their paths to the information. Every user got the same information, regardless of his or her needs. They could not automatically highlight information that was particularly useful in doing their jobs. People often did not know where to look for the information that was relevant to fulfilling their roles and functions, and they wasted a lot of time trying to find it."

OZ therefore decided to look at new approaches, including Microsoft.NET and Java portal technologies, to concentrate information flows and avoid information overload. "It was clear that this was the key to increasing productivity and therefore company profitability," says van Dongen. After careful evaluation, OZ decided that the SAS Information Delivery Portal (IDP) was the best solution for their needs. "Integration with existing SAS applications was the key factor in this decision. However, in addition to the flexibility and ease of implementation, we were also attracted by the fully integrated security model offered by the SAS Information Delivery Portal."

Incredibly Easy Installation
Van Dongen says that moving applications from the company intranet to the IDP was incredibly easy. "Installing the portal and related software on the Windows 2000 server took just four hours, and installing the software on the clients' took only one hour. And everything ran the first time. We spent maybe another one or two hours customizing the look and feel with the company colours and logo, so we very rapidly had a portal that looked like our own."

OZ then piloted the new IDP for three days, in which time they made various adjustments and enhancements to windows and links, before rolling the system out to the first batch of live users. The SAS Information Delivery Portal gives customers the option to create and adjust a "Public Kiosk" of information that is available to everyone, even when logged off. The OZ Kenniscentrum customized this Public Kiosk, added a second public window with links to the pre-existing static intranet content, and created an additional "Kenniscentrum Window" to demonstrate how departmental information could be presented through sub-windows with links to SAS reports and tables. "It all worked like a dream," says van Dongen.

By June 2003 OZ had made the IDP a central point of information access, with full user authentication and authorization for all 600 employees. Each of them can personalize a home window with information of particular relevance. Middle managers have an additional window displaying information about their own departments, and senior managers have a window giving a strategic overview of all departments within the relevant sector.

"One of the nice features is that you can ask the portal to display the results of batch programs when they become available under the title 'Report Results'. This is especially useful for running standard but non-urgent reports when you don't have time to wait for results."

The success of the portal is such that the OZ Kenniscentrum is currently making it the hub of its knowledge management strategy, transferring information currently within Lotus Notes to the IDP, replacing existing SAS/IntrNet programs with portal-based reports, and replacing information delivery via e-mail with IDP publication channels. "An important next step will be to provide a window displaying departmental key performance indicators (KPIs) to middle managers and more consolidated KPIS to senior managers," says van Dongen.

Raising Productivity
Van Dongen's team is also looking at ways to further enhance the home window. "To take full advantage of a portal's benefits, you have to encourage maximum usage," says van Dongen. "Getting people to use the portal is key to raising productivity and, as a result, company profitability." In addition, giving the information consumers the ability to generate their own reports saves IT and knowledge management professionals a lot of time and resources. Van Dongen believes he has freed up the equivalent of one full time employee through the implementation of the portal. "But so far we have only scratched the surface. The long-term return on investment will be hard to quantify as it is always difficult to factor in the more intangible benefits, but there is no doubt that the contribution to our corporate vitality will be very substantial indeed."

Van Dongen advises that "it's not good enough simply to design a home window that looks nice and provides what you think is useful information. You have to ask the users what they want and actively show them the range of possibilities for accessing information that already exists. Setting up the SAS Information Delivery Portal is not in itself a major technical challenge. The greater challenge is to move the concept out to everybody so that the organization gets maximum benefit."

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