Benchmarking IT Portfolio Performance

Computerworld - Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts Inc. is relying on IT portfolio management software and services in order to roll with changes occurring in the health care industry.
"The health care industry is going through a turning point where members are playing a bigger role in the future of health care financing and delivery," says Carl Ascenzo, CIO at the Boston-based health care organization. "So we wanted to look at where we've invested in technology, where we should be investing and how that impacts the operational business."
Two years ago, the company began using a set of software and benchmarking services from ITCentrix Inc. to support its IT portfolio management practice. The vendor, a Framingham, Mass.-based consultancy, was founded by former IDC analyst Dave Vellante.
Most of the software tools Blue Cross and Blue Shield had evaluated prior to its engagement with ITCentrix tended to focus on the costs of IT investments rather than the value that could be extrapolated from those investments. That's what ITCentrix brought to the table, Ascenzo says. Prior to linking up with ITCentrix, "we had a very good process for evaluating IT initiatives and prioritizing them. What we wanted to do was to look at our IT investments from more of a business value standpoint than from a cost-centric basis," he says.
Creating the Benchmarks
The ITCentrix software has enabled Blue Cross and Blue Shield to evaluate which IT investments are meeting its expectations and which ones aren't. Blue Cross and Blue Shield also wanted to tap ITCentrix data to compare its IT support costs and return-on-investment figures with those of its industry peers and companies in other industries. Vellante says. ITCentrix gathers financial metrics for millions of organizations across the U.S. by drawing upon data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Internal Revenue Service and other sources.
To supplement those figures, ITCentrix surveys roughly 700 companies annually to evaluate how IT contributes to their business and impacts revenue generation, productivity and other aspects of their operations, says Vellante. In addition, ITCentrix pulls together IT expense data from 2,500 organizations.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield recently drew upon this data to evaluate how other health care firms had fared with their customer relationship management investments. "The expectation was that there would be operational cost efficiencies, but over the last 15 to 18 months, we discovered that companies aren't realizing those gains," Ascenzo says.