Debi Mofford has been CIO of WCF since 2004. Before she became CIO, she was a software developer and business analyst for many of WCF’s systems. Prior to joining WCF in the mid-90s, she was a software developer in the aerospace industry. Among her several areas of industry and community involvement, she participates on University of Utah and Utah State advisory boards for the MIS departments and serves on the board of AIM and the First Tee of Utah.
What are your top priorities for the next 6-12 months?
Our major priority is implementing a new core system to support our new lines of business. That’s the project that gets any available resources. Enablement of those new lines is our number one priority.
As part of that, we’re re-doing our agency portal and customer portal to expand and redesign its capabilities. We’re also integrating it with the new multiline platform.
Our second priority, because we’ve been a monoline and mostly single-state carrier for 100 years, is our bill repricing platform. We have extensive provider networks and medical bill repricing in our home state, but as part of geographic expansion, we’re migrating to an external bill repricing platform, allowing us to leverage their networks and experience. Increased automation, including electronic submissions and payments, are going to be key to our expansion.
Our next big priority is providing a system for our loss control/safety program. We originally planned to use a vendor-provided solution, but the platforms we looked at didn’t really support our distinctive value-add. We have a very hands-on service that includes education, safety programs, and certifications. So we ended up deciding to expand one of our other in-house systems to meet that need. This route is actually a faster route as well.
We’re also moving our document management system to a modern vendor. We’re working with them to convert our legacy image library. This project is about halfway done.
We’re also investing in cloud infrastructure as part of our core systems project, and of course security and privacy are an ongoing area of investment, as they are for everyone!
What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the past couple of years?
The biggest change is the awakening of the business to the fact that everything they want to do requires some enablement by technology. That has been a huge change. The business has realized that they need to be engaged in owning the product experience. As part of our expansion beyond workers’ comp, business and IT are really coming together to ensure mutual understanding of requirements and business needs of new products and features.
What do you see as some of the biggest challenges ahead?
Technology is changing so rapidly and keeping our skillsets current creates a tremendous challenge. By the time you roll something out, it needs to be upgraded. As the panelists discussed at the recent Novarica Council Meeting, we can’t have massive vendor upgrades every few years—we need to have continuous improvement. One of the reasons we selected our core vendor was their shared code model.
Technology is changing so fast that if you can’t keep up with the demands of the business, they will find other solutions that can. They expect mobile-simple experiences. We’ve recently hired some UX people to help us deliver those experiences internally and externally. They’re helping us simplify and make our processes more intuitive. They’ve helped us transform our thinking about usability.
In terms of staff, we’re encouraging our staff to think about reinventing their skillsets every few years. Change is positive and necessary. Some IT careers didn’t exist five years ago. When we hire people now, adaptability and positive energy about change is one of the things we look for.
How have you and your team leveraged your Novarica relationship?
We have loved the partnership with Novarica. There’s no way that our new product lines would be where they are without Novarica’s help. It helped to get executive buy-in. One of the reasons we selected our vendor partner is because Novarica helped us see their potential. I’m really grateful for that. Also, we worked with Novarica to build and refine our multi-year strategy, and to ensure we were ready as an organization to take on this transformation project.
It’s been great to have the active support of the team whenever we have a question. Getting peer perspective is also really helpful, both through the Research Council meetings and the experts on the Novarica senior team. The value Novarica has added has made us a better organization.
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