Portfolio of Steve Ingram

Success Stories

SERFF

Stakeholders: National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), State Departments of Insurance, and independent Insurance Companies operating within the United States
Business Case Overview: The NAIC is a non-profit organization that represents the collective interests of State Departments of Insurance. When an insurance company wants to offer a new insurance product (e.g. term life insurance) they need to obtain the approval of the State Department of Insurance for each State they plan to make it available. As part of the actuarial process, they must submit documentation, based on State specific requirements, for review and final approval. The documentation required differs depending on the State and the type of insurance. When offering an insurance product to multiple States, this becomes a significant logistical effort. Traditionally, this has been a paper-centric process utilizing the standard postal system for delivery. The related postage and manually handling of documents, has been very inefficient and costly. The NAIC wanted to develop a computerized system to handle the workflow process between all US States and all insurance companies. In addition, they knew that States and insurance companies may not have the information technology infrastructure or staff to support the application. The NAIC decided that a hosted, web-based application would be most ideal. The system was named the “System for Electronic Rating and Form Filing” (SERFF).
Solution: As the e-Business Solutions Manager at Integrated Corporate Solutions, Inc. (ICS), I worked closely with the Vice-President of Sales to respond the NAIC’s Request for Proposal (RFP) and secured their business. We proposed services for software development, hosting, and help desk support. Once awarded, I hired and managed a team of programmers, with expertise with Lotus Notes and Java. The programming team included US based staff and offshore programmers from India. I acted as the primary liaison with the customer regarding all aspects of the project, including requirements gathering, technology choices, infrastructure, customer satisfaction, and billing. Because of the need to interconnect multiple States and insurance companies into a complex computing infrastructure, I personally architected a unique topology. This architecture included ICS as a preferred hosting provider. Since its release in 1998, the SERFF application has been a huge success. Almost all States and over 2000 insurance companies use SERFF today. For more information, visit the SERFF website.

WorkSafe

Stakeholders: Integrated Corporate Solutions, Inc. (ICS), Safety Management Corporation (SMC), Black & Veatch, EHSManager.com, and venture capital investors
Business Case Overview: In 1998, ICS was approached, in an IBM orchestrated deal to partner with SMC. The goal was to bring to market a state-of-the-art OSHA and EPA compliance application called WorkSafe. SMC had industry recognition as a consultant and expert on applying OSHA and EPA regulations and ICS had a proven track record for developing sophisticated web applications. The goal was to build an online web application that allowed companies to easily build environmental health and safety plans. The program would allow program administrators to customize the plan to their specific company needs, allow employees to have 24/7 access to the information, and allow the tracking of incidents.
Solution: As the e-Business Solutions Manager for ICS, I was involved in early negotiations and plans. I acted as the primary software architect. I designed the entire web application from inception and led the software development team. As the web application began to take shape, additional investors became interested. In 1999, a new company called EHSManager.com was formed in a partnership between ICS, SMC, and Black & Veatch, a large engineering firm. I personally was granted a large share of stock options for my initial involvement and vision in the project. With the release of the software, EHSManager's Fortune 1000 customer base grew quickly. Plans were underway to make WorkSafe the OSHA/EPA Compliance module for technology giant SAP and take EHSManager.com public. Additionally, IBM planned to market the product. Unfortunately, despite a huge following, multiple rounds of venture capital financing, and projected annual revenues of $50 million by 2004, EHSManager folded in the wake of September 11th. This was primarily due to a fall in the company's valuation. This Kansas City Business Journal article provides a comprehensive account of the events.

Requirements Team

Stakeholders: Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) - Air Traffic Organization (ATO)
Business Case Overview: The FAA ATO has initiated a reorganization effort to centralize its Information Technology functions. As part of that effort, they want to mature their software engineering practices. This includes improving their software development requirement gathering practices.
Solution: Being recognized as a project manager with expertise applying Project Management principles and IBM’s Rational Unified Process (RUP), I was consulted for my advice regarding a new ATO project. I met with executives involved in the project and presented an overview of the recommended Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). As a result, I was asked to form a Requirements Team that would guide the ATO through the initial phases of the project. Key emphases was placed on the first two phases of the Rational Unified Process, namely Inception and Elaboration. The milestone objective of Inception is to join together desparate stakeholders to define the scope and goals of the project. The milestone objective of Elaboration is to refine requirements to the point that an architecture baseline for the project is realized. I formed the Requirements Team using individuals with skills in project management, software architecture, business analysis, and technical writing. As hiring and training these individuals could not happen overnight, I served in many of these roles for the first project. Thereafter, I acted as a manager and mentor to the team. Additionally, many of the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) have become extremely versed and supportive of the SDLC applied. Key executives have recognized the significant accomplishments of the team and the application of its disciplines is being expanded.

e-Business

Stakeholders: Integrated Corporate Solutions, Inc. (ICS)
Business Case Overview: In 1995, IBM purchased the Lotus Corporation and acquired their Lotus Notes software. Lotus Notes is a groupware application with capabilities such as e-mail, calendaring and scheduling, and document workflow. It contains its own Visual Basic like scripting language called LotusScript, allowing it to be customized for many uses. ICS is one of IBM’s premier business partners reselling IBM hardware and providing related services such as server administration, networking, and security consulting. They were being encouraged by IBM to add Lotus Notes to their service offerings in the Kansas City area. One of ICS’s key accounts was American Century, a mutual funds company based in Kansas City. American Century had recently purchased a large number of servers from ICS to roll out their Lotus Notes infrastructure. ICS contacted American Century to learn about who was performing the roll out.
Solution: I was finishing up a contract with American Century, implementing their Lotus Notes infrastructure, when I was contacted by ICS. Subsequently, I was hired to help ICS establish a new business offering centered around Lotus Notes technologies. Initially, I helped ICS obtain business with many Kansas City area companies. Many of these companies become repeat customers for ICS. Over time, these service offerings grew into a new division of the company called "e-Business Solutions". I was promoted to the manager of that division and our focus expanded from Lotus Notes to all software development. Under my direction, the e-Business Solutions division grew to contribute one-third (33‰) of ICS’s overall revenue.

IOTA

Stakeholders: Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) - Air Traffic Organization (ATO), Aviation Flight Safety (AVS), Human Resoures (AHR)
Business Case Overview: The FAA was mandated by its parent organization, the Department of Transportation (DOT), to utilize an Enterprise Learning Management system called eLMS to record all training activities. While eLMS provided much of the functionality required by the FAA, it did not satisfy some very specific needs for tracking on-the-job training. These needs were being address by a multitude of disparate applications across the agency. The FAA needed an application to work with their existing eLMS system and provide the missing functionality at an enterprise level. Knowing that operations across different business units needed to be coordinated into a unified solution, they decided to kick off a requirements gathering effort. The project was called Integrated On-the-Job Tracking Training Application (IOTA).
Solution: Based on my reputation, I was selected to lead the effort. I met with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and guided them to a unified solution. The process involved multiple meetings with the project stakeholders to understand their needs and work through organization differences. I utilized the Rational Unified Process (RUP) to apply best practices to software engineering and my expertise as a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) to manage the project effort. The first challenge of the project was to establish a common vocabulary. While business units may have done things similarly, they used different terminology. They needed to speak the same language to understand one another and come to a common consensus of the problem. Using a Use Case Model, based on the industry standard Unified Modeling Language (UML), we began to understand the functionality that was needed. While information was gathered through discussions, the content was captured in RUP standard document templates and validated with the SMEs. Because of the disciplines utilized, the satisfaction of the SMEs, and management’s recognition of the clarity of requirements, the processes and methods used are being applied to other projects.