MITEM Case Study - Commonwealth of Virginia DHRM
Background
The Department of Human Resource Management (DHRM) is
responsible for Virginia’s
system of human resources management. DHRM serves numerous
constituents who relyupon the Agency for advice, guidance,
and assistance. The Department’s primary
constituents are the Governor—including his Cabinet
and staff—state agencies, legislators and their
staffs, employees, citizens, and local government officials.
The vision put forth by DHRM is “to provide leadership
in human resources management, which is responsive to
the goals and needs of the Commonwealth of Virginia
and its work force.”
Governor’s Executive Order 65 DHRM was under mandate
to comply with The Governor’s Executive Order
65 (2000)which states: “…technology must
also be applied to make government operate more efficiently
and to allow state employees to become more productive…”
Health benefits information was the perfect example
of the type of information that needed to be easily
accessible to State employees and retirees. “To
do this we needed a product that could adapt to different
platforms and applications, and let us deploy distributed
services – Web services. MITEM has successfully
met those requirements,” stated Belchior Mira,
CIO for DHRM.
Before MitemView
Previously, employees who wanted to enroll or make changes
to their health benefits
during open enrollment were required to fill out a health
enrollment form or waiver form. Employees would have
to go to their respective Human Resource office, get
the correct form and then usually take it home to talk
over issues and options with their families. They would
then have to return the completed forms to the HR office.
A benefits administrator would subsequently key the
information into the legacy
system, and files would be sent to the various insurance
carriers to update their systems, produce new identification
cards, and process claims. It used to take 3 to 4 weeks
to complete this process and make the employee change
effective.
The
EmployeeDirect Portal Application
DHRM used
MITEM’s signature product, MitemView,
to integrate their legacy systems with a new, Web-based
application called EmployeeDirect that allows employees
and retirees to access benefits information. The EmployeeDirect
Web site allows some 120,000 Virginia state employees
and retirees access to their health care and benefits
programs and the ability to make changes to those programs.
Changes entered by employees on the EmployeeDirect Web
site are updated in real-time via MitemView to the DHRM
databases that reside on a Unisys mainframe. This automated
process
eliminates approximately 7 to 10 solid days of data
entry that is normally required at the end of each yearly
open enrollment period.
Why MitemView Was Selected
MITEM won the DHRM contract after a successful proof
of concept (POC) demonstration. For the POC, a MITEM
consultant was given data from three sources: health
benefits, the personnel system, both of which are on
the same Unisys mainframe, and workers’ compensation
data from an Oracle database on UNIX. “MITEM brought
everything
together by employee identification into one Web page
in less than 2 days. From this demonstration we immediately
saw the advantage of MitemView and how it would work
perfectly for the EmployeeDirect project. That is why
we got MitemView, and why we are very happy with it,”
remarked Mira.
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