Many avenues lead to innovation, but all of them share one common attribute—seeing the possibilities that come from taking a different approach. Sometimes a change in perspective can be the key to generating sustained innovation. For organizations willing to see the world in a new way and establish an innovative vision, the opportunities are endless.

"The needs of the organization are continually challenging the paradigm of the company," says Unum Systems Manager Paula Soltys.

At one such company, Unum US, a provider of employee benefits products and services, innovation is flourishing. The company's new vision statement is clear: "We will be the absolute best at building meaningful and lasting connections between employers, their employees and the benefits we provide." This simple statement, and its shift in focus, marked a change in how the company, as well as its work force, approaches its business.

A simple approach
"Unum is embodying the vision statement throughout the corporation," notes Systems Manager Paula Soltys. Its new Simply Unum platform is a tangible example of the new vision. With Simply Unum, the organization has moved from being a products-oriented company to one that provides services on a unified platform.

In the past, Unum viewed its business as serving the employers that bought its policies. Now "Unum understands that our customers are the employees of that employer," Soltys says. "We're going to be a platform that employers choose to use. We will differentiate ourselves by our customer service, strong relationships and engaging the employees who are actually the consumers."

Simply Unum markets a package of products directly to enterprises with fewer than 500 employees. "Unum took the most popular product offerings and packaged them in a simplified way," says Systems Consultant Rob Bankston of Unum. It's a self-service program that reduces response time substantially. The wizard-like platform gives customers one entry point into Unum to access the various services it offers.

By employing a services platform, Unum now can partner with third parties. "When an employer thinks of its benefits—medical, retirement, disability, life insurance, vision, dental, et cetera—we want them to think of Unum," Soltys says. "We may not offer all these products today, but we can enroll them through partnerships. It's a huge change in how Unum views itself. We want to focus on relationships, as embodied in the vision statement."

To foster those relationships inside and outside the organization, Unum is leveraging its culture of innovation, relying on employees to make the changes happen. According to Soltys and the data warehouse team, the employees are rising to the challenge. They are balancing the needs of the current day-to-day business and the future. "The challenge is that while you're building up the new structure, you still have to service the old," Soltys notes. "So we're taking incremental steps, project by project."

Accomplishing the new vision calls for a major shift not only in how Unum and its employees view the company but also in how data is viewed. The new vision means the company's data warehouse and its contents have more prominent roles. "Every part of the company needs a piece of the information contained in the data warehouse," says Bankston, who sees the data warehouse as "becoming the single enterprise data provider for the entire organization."

The rising importance of the data warehouse is spurring change throughout the organization. It's up to Soltys and her colleagues to help manage those changes and encourage acceptance of them. The team is taking its role to heart. Through the work of this group, Unum's departments are embracing the shift in outlook and thinking.

A new outlook
Communicating the benefits of change has become part of the data warehouse team members' job descriptions. "We're evangelizing," says Bankston. "We are trying to shift the mind-set of our colleagues to see the long-term, bigger picture." Their counterparts in IT "need to stop thinking of the data warehouse as being the back-office reporting solution and start thinking of us as the data provider," he says. "Why not use such a rich resource?"

To facilitate the change in attitudes and thought processes, a data warehouse forum and team meetings are available where questions can be raised and answers given. "We work with a lot of high-performing people. There are a lot of questions but no resistance to the change," says Bankston.

Ensuring data integrity
Since every part of the company will be using data, there's more emphasis on accuracy, or data quality. "If we are going to be on an integrated platform, our data better be right," Soltys says. "We're looking at tools and methodologies to help us create a data governance program."

While Unum is in the early stages of constructing this program, the person overseeing the process, Enterprise Data Architect Edie Bice, says, "Unum believes the data governance program is a business-owned program, not one owned by IT. My job is to evangelize with the various architects—business, systems, technical—and they're right on board with it."

Technical Architect John S. Pennoyer is responsible for setting up the service-oriented architecture (SOA) at the company. He's an advocate of the changes, noting that "I had to start looking at things differently—I had to start letting go of our applications and start looking at data holistically."

The Simply Unum platform resulted in the retirement of an application-based architecture and created one that focuses on services and data, information and process. "People started to recognize that the application isn't all that important, but the process and data are the two most important things," Pennoyer says. "Our business partners within Unum get it and see the value of it."

Soltys concurs with that analysis. Thanks to SOA, "there's a lot of value being put on the data," Soltys says. "The data warehouse is no longer an afterthought. It's become more like a partnership with people thinking, 'I can't be successful unless I know where the data is, how to get to it and whether it is timely.'�"

Flow of innovation
According to Unum's data warehouse team, there's a real sense that innovation flows through the enterprise, encouraging fluidity of thought and action. Notes Soltys, "The needs of the organization are continually challenging the paradigm of the company." By embracing change and creating a culture of innovation, Unum has set itself apart as a leader. The impact can be seen in the company's approach to its customers, employees and data solutions. T

Shirley S. Savage is a freelance writer based in Maine, who writes about technology, science and energy.

Teradata Magazine-December 2008