Of the benefits the insurance provider Delta Dental of Virginia has accrued from its use of business intelligence software, the biggest can't really be tallied in dollars and cents or other hard metrics. It's one of those squishy-soft people pluses.
"To be honest, I think the biggest benefit is the improvement in the culture here," says John Sheffield, director of software development at Delta.
Over the course of the last four years, Delta has spawned a culture of knowledge workers, thanks to the analytics, dashboard, and reporting capabilities it's employed. People don't just scan and then pass along reports anymore -- they actually read them.
"We're at a point now where they really understand the data sufficiently and can go in and analyze that data and come up with interesting concepts as to where the organization at large should be going relative to pricing or product offerings or things of that nature," Sheffield says.
This cadre of knowledge workers doesn't just hail from departments like the underwriting and provider relations groups that tend to draw more data-oriented people anyway. Now BI- and data-hungry folks live in all the operational departments, from claims processing to marketing, plus upper management, he said.
Seeing people actively engaged in figuring out how they can help make the business better is a wonderful thing, Sheffield says. "And now that they have the capabilities and the tools that let them readily do that, it's not this Herculean effort beyond mere mortals to get the information together and analyze it."
Delta has gone an open-source route for its BI initiative, using the Pentaho BI suite. Several capabilities have come out of the BI effort for various user constituencies. For example:
Underwriters can now run ad-hoc queries, build relational or dimensional models, analyze the information, and make more data-driven decisions. They might create a model to see how Delta is doing by group and how it could do better on pricing. "We might earn more people's business, or we might find where we're leaving a little bit of margin on the table -- you never know."
Provider relations personnel can monitor claims data via a homegrown tool that sits on top of the BI software and detects "abhorrent behavior" by providers that Delta reimburses as part of its network. "This is an attempt to reduce fraud and abuse and therefore save premiums for our groups and subscribers."
The tool already has served Delta "extremely well," Sheffield said, citing a substantial fraud case settled this year based on data from the system.
The senior management team has just started to get off the ground with dashboards, getting near-real-time access to how the business is faring from operational and financial perspectives. Previously, business managers reported this information via Excel spreadsheets and in PowerPoint presentations. "Now it's all really just a click away, so to speak. They can go online and clearly see how the business is faring against KPIs set in place by the board."
Additional enhancements, such as increased interactivity, will come in October, Sheffield said.
Software developers build the OLAP cubes needed for data mining but then step aside and let the underwriters run their queries at will, leaving themselves to focus on other business needs. "Before we had Pentaho in place, we were having to constantly run extracts that underwriters would then in turn import into tools like Access or, if the data was small, Excel. Now we don't have to be involved at all."
Self-service has become a mantra, and BI has become inculcated in the company's culture, Sheffield says.
"You can't go to a meeting from a strategic or analytical perspective where the word 'BI' isn't brought up -- and I can tell you for a fact that even as little as two years ago, that was unheard of. Nobody would even mention it."
People see the advantage of BI now that they've got the right tools in hand, he said. "We're getting into the essence of what we all understand as BI, where we're analyzing data for the good of the organization from a strategic, forward-looking view, as opposed to relying on static management reports, which are backwards looking."
@ Sean, I agree. Analytics isn't not cold numbers but rather being able to see life in tiny detail.
It seems Delta has ingrained into it's workers on how accessable this data is and how it is such an important tool. I've seen in some companies were personel did have access, however didn't make the connection on how it could improve their jobs or make life easier.
I love this part of the article: " Delta has spawned a culture of knowledge workers, thanks to the analytics, dashboard, and reporting capabilities it's employed. People don't just scan and then pass along reports anymore -- they actually read them."
When I'm reading and analzing reports and sometimes go back to an employee and see their shock that "Yes, I actually do read them."
P.S. Beware to health care providers because many insurers are implementing this type of fraud detection software.
Unfortunately, so much of what we do in this country is about bilking the system. Government contractors are another group that has long exploited inefficiencies and "look the other way" attitudes. But that's starting to change too, as government agencies, under pressure themselves, are beginning to demand evidence-based analysis of their contractors, as Shyam Desigan notes in his AllAnalytics.com post today.
Yes, Shawn, and it's good that Delta wants to get a clear picture on this. Years ago I complained to Oxford insurance about a certain doctor's practice that tried to augment the flat rate paid for prenatal care by delaying the pregnancy diagnosis and billing for each of the early visits and the ultra-sound as separate items. They didn't seem to care to know about it. It was rather like a teacher who knows that students are cheating but prefers looking the other way rather than confronting them on it.
At the very least, you would expect that it can allow everyone to see the magnitude of the problem a bit better, like creating an effective model for your monthly household budget. It helps you see better where your money is going and, if you don't like what you see, can be the first step in correcting things.
Not sure where we get the notion that numbers somehow abstract the real world or that they make things somehow detached and unreal. The fact is, as we see here, they can also help us see the world in new ways.
Arielle, agreed. I think that is a valuable use of the BI capabilities. For the future, Delta would like to get even more aggressive on monitoring and stopping fraud. The tool it uses today is great at providing a lot of analytic capabilities, but Sheffield says it'll continue to enhance that with more algorithms that enable provider relations to discover abhorrent behavior even more quickly. He says it'll have to mine across a few more metrics to see if the provider is truly worth investigating, and build in more automation so it can look at larger sample sizes, get more accurate results, and probably integrate back to the transaction system to place providers on hold, as necessary.
I have to agree here too Shawn. If generating data and metrics is the goal of the exercise then you've missed the point. You want to unleash your employees creativity in the real world, not one they imagine to be true. Data just describes what the world is. Hopefully employees will look at it and go "Really? I didn't know that? What can we do to make it better?" or "That's what I thought. I wasn't just imagining things. We need to fix this problem."
This in-flight connectivity provider got its revenue projections in line using business analytics to better understand the variables affecting its fledgling business.
LEADERS FROM THE BUSINESS AND IT COMMUNITIES DUEL OVER CRITICAL TECHNOLOGY ISSUES
The Current Discussion
Visual Analytics: Who Carries the Onus? The Issue: Data visualization is an up-and-coming technology for businesses that want to deliver analytical results in a visual way, enabling analysts the ability to spot patterns more easily and business users to absorb the insight at a glance and better understand what questions to ask of the data. But does it make more sense to train everybody to handle the visualization mandate or bring on visualization expertise? Our experts are divided on the question. The Speakers: Hyoun Park, Principal Analyst, Nucleus Research; Jonathan Schwabish, US Economist & Data Visualizer
To save this item to your list of favorite AllAnalytics content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
If you found this interesting or useful, please use the links to the services below to share it with other readers. You will need a free account with each service to share an item via that service.
Elizabeth Barth-Thacker, a BI and informatics technology manager at Humana, tells us how her team is creating data transparency and building engagement with the business – with the help of an internal collaboration portal called Humanalytics.
Speaking at SAS Global Forum Executive Conference, Rajeev Kaul, SVP of pricing at OfficeMax, uses a Chinese proverb to explain one of the reasons he's deploying SAS Visual Analytics.
In an All Analytics interview, Mike Cavaretta, technical leader, predictive analytics at Ford Research & Advanced Engineering, shares how big-data is fueling vehicle decisions.
Analytics professionals and SAS executives share how organizations can get on with their work so much faster when working in a high-performance and visual analytics environment.
Analytics professionals who attended SAS's recent Executive Briefing in New York share how they think visual analytics might help their organizations get better value from data.
At Boeing, effective decision making comes down to this simple formula: QxA=E, as executive Jerry Allyne explained at the recent INFORMS analytics conference.
Whether working in major league sports, financial services, or healthcare, analytics, and data, professionals are checking out how visual analytics and high-performance technologies can help them optimize their environments, shrink their cycle times, and improve decision making, as attendees at the recent SAS Executive Briefing in New York share with us.
SAS CEO Jim Goodnight speaks with us at a recent SAS Executive Briefing about getting a feel for what's in your big-data and other new realities powered by advanced analytics.
Dynamic data visualizations let analysts and business users interact with the data, changing variables or drilling down into data points, and see results in a flash. Advance your use of data visualization with tools that support features like auto-charting, explanatory pop-ups, and mobile sharing.
No doubt your enterprise is amassing loads of data for fact-based decision-making. Hand in hand with all that data comes big computational requirements. Can traditional IT infrastructure handle the increasing number and complexity of your analytical work? Probably not, which is why you need a backend rethink. Big data calls for a high-performance analytics infrastructure, as Fern Halper, a partner at the IT consulting and research firm, Hurwitz & Associates, discusses here.
Redbox's bright-red DVD kiosks are all but ubiquitous these days, located in more than 28,000 spots across the country. Jayson Tipp, Redbox VP of Analytics and CRM, provides an insider's look at how the company has accomplished its phenomenal nine-year growth.
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), a seven-brand global hotelier, has woven analytics into the fabric of its operations. David Schmitt, director of performance strategy and planning, shares IHG's analytics story and his lessons learned.
Tweet This
11 
5 
