Gate 1, Gate 2, Gate 3 . . .

In my second year at PBC, I introduced IT governance - in the form of a gating process. Why wait until the second year? Because past experience has taught me that too much change, introduced too quickly, does more harm than good. Circuit overload may cause pushback!

Now, before a project can even get to the doorstep of the approval process, it has to be sponsored by a vice president. Only then is it ready for gate 1 - or what we call the "thumbs up/down" gate. Here, the executive sponsor presents the idea to the executive committee, and the members give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. If the project is approved, the proposal continues to the next level (gate 2).

For gate 2, the sponsor presents a detailed cost-benefit analysis, because no matter how wonderful the idea, if the cost is too high for the projected benefits, that's it. If it passes gate 2 and is more than $500,000, a gate 3 or detailed business case is prepared. Gate 4 is only for projects that have to be reviewed at the executive level because they cost more than $1 million or are very complex. Gate 5 is the post-implementation review.

Last year, for example, our senior VP of client development presented a gate 1 concept of adding dental and extended health usage information to our member portal. The executive committee gave his idea the "thumbs up". The PMO then helped him to develop a gate 2 high-level business case, which was also approved. As a result, our members can now obtain information online about their coverage usage, thus reducing the number of calls to our call centre.

Through our "gating governance", everyone can see how projects are prioritized and approved. We're able to plan and measure benefits of projects and assess how they enable our business initiatives.

Even though projects of more than a month's effort are now overseen by the PMO, projects of smaller effort also need to be kept aligned with business needs. To do that, we established the change review board. Headed by a manager from the business area, this board reviews all change requests, assigning priorities based on how the change will enable the business. Three years ago, IT was swamped with more than 700 change requests and there was not much hope we'd get to all of them. So we asked all owners of change requests to resubmit any requests that were over a year old. With the change review board prioritizing the requests, we're now able to see which are the most pressing, which ones overlap and which will be superseded by some that are more encompassing.

In three years we've come a long way, and these new initiatives would not have succeeded without the active involvement of senior management and the IT team's hard work. But we still face a number of challenges.

For instance, we still need to do a better job of conducting regular post-mortems of larger projects to gather lessons learned. And even when we do gather lessons learned on an ad hoc basis, we still aren't disseminating them to the appropriate personnel so they can learn from previous experiences. Some of the new technology we are implementing - portals, document management and knowledge management - should help with this.

The road to Rome wasn't built in a day. But there's one thing we're confident of: The framework we've put in place not only ensures that IT is already more focused on business, but that focus is advancing our business goals. In short, IT is enabling all the employees of Pacific Blue Cross to serve our members better.

Dr Catherine Aczel Boivie is the senior VP of IT at Pacific Blue Cross. She is the founding chair of the CIO Association of Canada and (perhaps the activity she enjoys most) a Big Sister. She can be reached at cboivie@pac.bluecross.ca