ACORD is a nonprofit insurance association whose mission is to increase the efficiency of the agency distribution system and the insurance industry as a whole. ACORD is best known for its standard forms, but also sets standards electronic data interchange (EDI) and other agency automation technologies. Nearly 1,000 insurance companies are affiliated with ACORD as are 35,000 agencies, the major agency software providers, the national producer associations, user groups, and other industry associations. M2VP founders were the primary resources for the design, implementation, and deployment of a series of component standards for the Property and Casualty industry intended to support sophisticated electronic commerce among insurance companies and their customers and brokers. The result is now ACORD XML.

M2VP resources assisted Aetna in multiple ways. Within the Strategic Architecture group, two departments (Emerging Technology and Technology Enablement) needed to improve the exchange of information between them. Using a model-driven architecture approach, Platform Independent Models (PIMs) were developed by the Emerging Technology group while Platform Specific Models (PSMs) were developed for specific platforms by the Technology enablement group. Additionally, as Aetna merged in its US Healthcare operations, business analysts found it difficult to make progress as much of the Information Technology (IT) staff did not understand the business and tended to communicate at too technical a level. Further, applications development was focused on stove-pipes, not the “big picture”. Using MDA concepts, requirements are now driven by the business analysts using business terms that later map into technology solutions. Aetna then asked for assistance in establishing a proficient Application Architecture group that acted as internal consultants to their application developments and helped to introduce economies of scale through architecture. M2VP assisted with the training, mentoring and with various software architecture document artifacts. Most recently, Aetna asked for Enterprise Architecture and long-term strategy assistance for their internal technology direction.

Affiliated Distributors (A-D) is a $26B private buying group where large contractors buy in bulk through A-D from large suppliers. M2VP performed an assessment of business, technical, organizational and process activities within A-D and introduced significant change in the technology and marketing group areas while establishing a long-term modernization strategy for the company to follow.

An international trading company wanted to change their trading systems – the core systems that the company’s livelihood depended on. Following a transition methodology, M2VP resources specifically delivered a component-based development process using a service-oriented architecture and model-driven architecture concepts. All core trading applications were re-architected as a series of delivered functionality that successively built new and updated functionality, based on component-based and flexible business rules (which the business users are able to change with no code changes what-so-ever) and the underlying services architecture. The transition proceeded over a 2-year period, and was on time and on budget.

One of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, AstraZeneca (AZ) asked M2VP to assist with two worldwide initiatives – a sales force automation analysis and review and an innovation motivation and intake process. Working with AZ country presidents and other key business executives on 4 continents, M2VP introduced a simple, easy-to-use change management process that allowed clear communication between business and technology resources and allowed new innovations to be mainstreamed into business areas so they were appropriate to the specific needs of each region and country but were delivered in parallel to all regions/countries.

CDI is a 49-year-old solutions company that is publicly traded and has over 80 offices in over 35 countries. It is a multi-billion dollar company with various staffing, engineering and aerospace divisions. CDI asked M2VP to assist with internal improvements in its project management, marketing and growth areas and CDI Solutions, a division of CDI, leverages M2VP strategic recommendations across multiple lines of business. Using a combination of project/portfolio management and cultural change techniques, M2VP helped a new division within CDI grow to almost $1B in two years.

Chiron is a research-driven healthcare company and the world’s second largest bio-technology company, employing more than 7,000 people in facilities on four continents. Chiron’s business initiative involved development and deployment of an advanced class of component-based clinical decision support systems to allow Chiron to better model and sell/distribute its own substantial clinical knowledge and information base, and also to act as a value-added broker/reseller of third-party knowledge and information. M2VP resources were involved in all aspects of development including the encryption and security of all patient data allowing later HIPAA compliance to be substantially easier to implement.

The Risk Management Group of this large mid-west insurance company required architectural assistance for two related projects, namely a billing system and an underwriting pricing module. Each of the projects incorporated a substantial amount of software component technology, a technology that was new to the group being asked to develop the projects. Mentoring was supplied to the organization in areas of component development skills, such as UML modeling, Java utilization and middleware development. Further, the company’s overall strategy and processes (regarding component technology) were evaluated and enhanced.

The CIO of one of the largest Philadelphia-based law firms – Cozen O’Connor – asked M2VP to assist with organizational restructuring, technology reviews and vendor management and coordination. The firm has since established a smaller core vendor pool with significantly closer partnership ties to the vendors. They also host a yearly Vendor Fair where Cozen’s long-term strategy and short-term projects are reviewed with all vendors simultaneously and where the vendors are challenged to work together to create new products or solutions suitable for Cozen but saleable beyond in order to benefit both Cozen and the involved vendors. M2VP helps coordinate the vendor fair and selected vendor proposal reviews.

Datacolor is a multi-national color management company with instruments, software and services for virtually all manufacturing sectors. Working with the CEO to introduce organizational change and then the CIO to streamline processes while automating several new business areas, Datacolor was able to retain significant growth even while the world economy was being eroded.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) needed an architecture that could be leveraged across multiple projects regardless of whether the projects were developed internally or by contractors. They recognized both cultural and contractual issues would need to be addressed and that their reference architecture would need to be platform independent to be suitable to a wide variety of projects and implementations. M2VP assisted with the introduction of model-driven architecture into the DOJ and worked with partner Compuware to bring the benefits of MDA into DOJ.

Fidelity wanted to use object technology as basis for designing and implementing client/server systems. This included a major new worldwide retail investment order entry and trading system as the initial deliverable to be based on the new technology.

Looking to commercialize various software that they either produced (or was developed under contract for them), GE ERC came to M2VP seeking help. After a high-level cataloging of software artifacts and the creation of high-level descriptions of the software to commercialize, ERC then asked for their software to be processed through M2VP’s model-driven architecture based processes to produce generic and more broadly suitable versions of the software from the same common source. In addition to the technical aspects, M2VP assisted ERC at multiple levels including marketing and brokerage of the repurposed software assets.

GSK is a multinational powerhouse with a presence in virtually every country. As the third largest pharmaceutical company in the world, GSK has many technology needs and unfortunately, many duplicate, conflicting or underused technologies. M2VP was asked to help with technology strategy and the creation of a list of technology strategies and guiding principles in an attempt to simplify the GSK technology environment. The project is ongoing and in 2012, a new global CIO began leveraging the knowledge and recommendations thus presented.

M2VP was asked to assist GMAC’s Enterprise Architecture Department in establishing a set of engineering best practices and to ensure GMAC is making effective use of modern technology, processes and tools. This is an ongoing activity that allows GMAC to leverage periodic reviews from M2VP experts on a monthly and quarterly basis.

The Hartford initially wanted to migrate their personal lines insurance application processing for dedicated agents to a web based platform. Longer term, they wanted support for independent agents and insureds as well as offering the same capabilities to their commercial lines business. Rather than simply web enabling their existing mainframe applications, The Hartford asked for an enterprise architecture-based approach, but one that would meet business needs in a timely and cost effective manner. Using a model-driven architecture approach based on business models being developed in parallel with a component-based infrastructure and an iterative and incremental development and release cycle, The Hartford was able to successfully complete its first phase within eight months. Subsequent deliveries of new functionality appeared every three months thereafter. Effort for new projects dropped 25% in time and resources as compared to traditional approaches and they moved up to a 50% savings as they grew their infrastructure and reusable capabilities.

Homecomings is a leading provider of wholesale funding services to US mortgage brokers, providing strong and stable sources of unregulated capital. As part of the GMAC family of companies, Homcomings asked M2VP to assist with a service-oriented architecture that leveraged model-driven architecture principles and other standards and best practices. Through a series of transition phases, Homecomings is introducing change to business, technical, organizational and process aspects of the Information Technology staff.

ITG, a major institutional investment and brokerage company wanted to re-architect their core POSIT system and asked for assistance for a transition of their development groups in California, New York and Israel to a component-based approach that leveraged a common services-oriented platform. They wanted their 150 developers to become proficient in the new techniques and processes without slowing their development deliverables down and in fact speeding up their ability to communicate effectively with business sponsors in order to deliver products more rapidly. They now use a service-oriented architecture with various business layers and are 50% faster in time to market and require 70% less maintenance.

IMA developed a call center software toolkit, EDGE, that is the core of the company’s business. Their decision to transition to component technology was driven by their need to achieve rapid turnaround in product development and the need for near immediate customizability of the toolkit to end customer needs. M2VP mentored this transition, and assisted in the development of a new enterprise component architecture that was the core of all product offerings.

ING, a major worldwide financial institution has worked with M2VP and M2VP founders over the past five years on several activities. For a mutual funds group, ING asked for assistance with the introduction of component technology to a group developing web-based management tools for agents, brokers and customers. When ING acquired Reliastar and Aetna Financial Services, it asked for strategic assistance to combine the groups at a technical level. Using transition services and various reviews and assessments, recommendations were presented to and implemented by ING successfully. ING significantly dropped its costs through consolidated data centers, centralized infrastructure support, the greater use of common services and a move towards reuse at multiple levels. Later, ING’s reinsurance group asked for assistance with the introduction and implementation of a reuse architecture-based on model-driven architecture principles, a continued evolution of the transition recommendations previously recommended and best practices/standards.

JPMorganChase’s corporate and institutional group required assistance with bringing enterprise architecture and services-oriented architecture principles to their technical architecture. They asked for an overall transition and transition process assistance to ensure that not only could any given project be developed using the new technologies and techniques, but that every project could do so in a consistent manner.

Lincoln acquired and merged five separate companies and was challenged in integrating these companies. The challenges are business, technical, organizational/cultural and process related spanning seven sites. M2VP was initially asked by the Divisional CIO of the Employer Markets Group to assess and recommend direction for a services-oriented architecture project which was tremendously late and over-budget. Later, M2VP helped develop an overall Software Development Life Cycle, requirements capture processes and offers strategic guidance and continued corporate integration coaching.

After trying to determine the financial risk exposure caused by the collapse of a trading partner, this investment bank vowed to fix the problem at the source. Their goal: a single point of reconciliation for all cash transactions related to buy/sell trading activities. To achieve the goal, the bank recognized that their business must drive their IT development. By using model-driven architecture concepts, business analysts were able to drive the formal design of a business-centric and platform independent view of the system they needed to reconcile the trading activities.

The approach included use of a formal design methodology, standardized modeling language, and a separation of concerns such that an architectural foundation could be established in parallel with the business-specific processing needed. Using these techniques within an iterative development cycle, requirements were rapidly captured and a first version of the product was delivered soon thereafter. The bank system handled $6B in daily trades and experienced only minor inconsistencies from that first version. None of these inconsistencies caused any interruption of processing and they were corrected within two weeks.

A large life insurance company asked for assistance with the re-facing of an existing application that supported underwriters and their caseloads for disability insurance claims. The project introduced a new middle-tier based services architecture and a new front-end to allow more rapid change to be introduced. Leveraging existing legacy systems, the re-faced product was easier to use and faster because of up-front pre-processing and validation even though it continued to utilize the same back end systems and storage. As a result of the successful introducing of the enterprise architecture approach on that project, the company initiated a request to rollout the architectural approach to 11 additional projects in three separate business divisions. The company also established an enterprise architecture group and subgroups to ensure consistency and support for future evolutions of the architecture as well as support for new development efforts in new group areas and application developments.

New Season is a leading provider of specialized quality care for Opioid Use Disorder (OUD), operating since 1986 with more than 80 addiction treatment centers in 20 states nationwide. Introduced by their CIO, M2VP assisted with organizational review and enterprise architecture assessments and updates.

The Province of Ontario has been developing enterprise-wide architectural best practices for approximately five years. When they wanted to determine if their efforts were on track and suitable for all agencies and groups within the provincial government, they asked M2VP to perform an architectural assessment and assist with the creation of a five-year plan for future efforts.

Working with the CIO of this multi-national animal pharmaceutical, M2VP introduced numerous organizational and cultural changes worldwide. Several major business-driven projects allowed Phibro to increase its market share while reducing their cost of goods. Numerous other lesser projects focused on internal process efficiencies, business continuity improvements, better alignment between the business and technology leaders of the company, improved vendor relations and improved employee morale.

Prudential wanted the rapid delivery of an Internet-based Auto Rate Quote capability that leveraged the existing rating engines and infrastructure. Using component-based development techniques and a team of five existing development team members and two mentors, this application was delivered in three months.

The State of New Mexico had just successfully implemented a state-wide intranet that it wanted to use to enhance residents’ interactions through on-line, library and agency-specific access. They had very old legacy systems that would have to be evolved over a period of time into more modern technology, but that had to be integrated with the on-line initiative immediately. Further, the systems available to the State were literally of every single type on any given platform and both custom built and purchased applications. In a three month period, a complete prototype of the State’s on-line system was produced.

Subaru is a Japanese-based vehicle manufacturer with a distribution company, Subaru of America (SOA). SOA’s CIO wanted to introduce change as soon as he took the helm of Subaru’s IT organization in 2005. He asked M2VP to produce a technology strategy with himself and his direct reports. The result was a mantra of: Simplicity, Flexibility and Cost-Effectiveness. Since 2005, M2VP has remained on special projects including corporate change management, new business development support, enterprise architecture, infrastructure streamlining, customer service and marketing improvements, company-wide business strategy re-focusing and executive management coaching. During this time, Subaru has been the only car manufacturer on the planet that has had year-after-year growth and profitability and M2VP is an ongoing part of the team that took Subaru from $4B to over $10B in just over five years while maintaining one of the highest customer retention ratings of any car company. Since then, the company has continued to leverage technology and in 2015 had over $13B in sales. In the past few years, M2VP has continued assisting with strategy and added IT vendor management to further improve the efficiency of this powerhouse OEM.

Sunoco is a Philadelphia-based energy company with a large petroleum-based products refinery business. Each year, Sunoco introduces new process operators to their various refineries. Sunoco recognized that effective training in soft-skills such as team interaction, self awareness and effective communications results in resources that become proficient more quickly, integrate into the team environment more readily and tend to remain with the company over long periods. M2VP assisted with development and delivery of a new process operator training program.

The Texas Guaranteed Student Loan Corporation (TGSLC) wanted to migrate from legacy applications to a web-based, highly nimble environment and wanted to increase the processing of loans 10-fold while shrinking the processing time by half. Introducing a service-oriented architecture and various hierarchical layers, based on a model-driven architecture approach, TGSLC went through a full transition taking their business, technical, organizational and process aspects forward in 2 years.

The Copeland Companies was part of the Traveler’s Group. In their capacity within the Group they are responsible for the bulk of the record keeping, transaction management and account balancing for the retirement (401K, etc.) and some life insurance products. With over 1M customers in their systems, Copeland is heavily relied upon by the Group to provide accurate, rapid turnaround of projects to support the varied products of the different companies. M2VP resources provided development assistance, architectural mentoring, analysis and design mentoring, education, and organizational/management consulting on a number of key application and infrastructure projects.

Wellpoint (previously Anthem, previously Trigon) worked with M2VP resources for over six years and numerous activities. Initially, Trigon requested assistance with a strategic transition assessment review and accompanying comprehensive architecture review. Using the recommendations from these reports, Trigon created a center of excellence that produced new service-oriented architecture foundations. The foundations were used to produce state-of-the-art point of care systems that have incorporated technological and business change over the full five-year period without any re-writes. Later, Anthem (which acquired Trigon in 2001) requested assistance with the introduction of a broader service-oriented architecture, to be built using model-driven architecture principles and that evolved the skill set of existing Anthem resources as well as reduced maintenance costs, increased efficiency and the ability for Anthem to continue acquiring additional companies. The Wellpoint merger in 2004 doubled Anthem’s size.

UBS is the world’s second largest bank, with assets of nearly $2 trillion. M2VP resources were involved in a number of related projects at UBS as part of a major, multi-year transition of UBS’ computing architecture to distributed component computing. In particular, the development of Global High Risk Portfolio Management (GHRPM), a mission-critical banking application based on intranet and component technology that helps UBS credit managers and top management interactively monitor, manage and report high-risk credit accounts of its corporate and private clients across the globe. Today over 500 UBS credit product managers worldwide access the system, which runs continuously (24/7), and has experienced only minor interruptions in service in over five months of operation, which has included several upgrades.

This German mobile telephone company introduced a next generation component-based application services architecture for point of sale (POS) applications that would allow POS services from a web client, integration/migration of existing services, increased competitive positioning and various technical efficiencies.

Viracon is a large architectural glass manufacturing company (sales ~$150MM). Viracon is a subsidiary of Apogee Enterprises, Inc., a large, diversified manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Apogee is in the process of standardizing its approach to software integration across all related business units using object technology, using Viracon as a pilot. M2VP resources assisted in the development and execution of a plan to transition Viracon’s current collection of disparate systems to an integrated set of components that are based on CORBA standards. This includes integration with next-generated MRP/ERP systems from major vendors such as Baan and Synquest.

VITAS Innovative Hospice Care is a pioneer and leader in the hospice movement since 1978 and is the nation’s largest provider of end-of-life care. Based in Miami, Florida, VITAS’ CIO introduced M2VP shortly after he joined. M2VP helped to establish the mission, vision and critical success factors for the IT group. Additionally, a three-year strategic direction and associated plan was created with accompanying enterprise architectural models to show current state and desired state views. Infrastructure changes focused on unified communications, customer care and general improvement of service levels while reducing costs.

Wells Fargo wanted their development architects to be aware of industry best practices and standards, to internalize this knowledge so as to apply it consistently across Wells developments and to ensure the knowledge is effectively shared within the organization and the projects developed by the organization. Sponsored by the CIO, M2VP was asked to assist with this transition of knowledge, with curriculum and knowledge transfer techniques and in general, to assist with the business, technical, organizational/cultural and process aspects of this transition.

Wyeth wanted their various divisions to benefit from each other through reusing various information technology components, services and patterns. They asked M2VP to assist the Wyeth Enterprise Application Architecture group in bringing the benefits of enterprise architecture to mainstream Wyeth teams. M2VP assisted with business, technical, cultural and process aspects and with focus on integration of purchased products and developed software. The new process significantly reduced the time to bring innovation to market and reduced the cost of new innovation initiatives by 75% in some cases.