Essay Instructions: The Minnesota Consulting Group (MCG) is a 50-person consulting services practice focusing on telecommunications and systems administration that has Minnesota offices in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Rochester. MCG has had some business opportunities in Wisconsin and Iowa and is considering branching out further within those states by adding offices in Madison, WI and Cedar Rapids, IA. Much of its projects and ongoing account work have been in retail operations.
As a telecommunications practice, MCG has assisted organizations in business and market planning, technological evaluations, and education for IT organizations that are planning to expand their own telecommunications infrastructure services and support. MCG began with technical specialists and, over time, an increasing amount of MCG business consists of auditing, governance, and business advisory activities. Because of current economic forces, MCG is considering branching out into other service industries such as health care and insurance.
MCG?s published areas of expertise include the following:
Network assessment
System architecture assessment
Risk assessment and business impact analysis
Information technology governance
System administration staffing
Minnesota Consulting Group: Key Personnel
Principal Consultant?Amy Smith
Business Process Consultant?Becky Fredrickson
Business Process Consultant?George Conrad
Sr. System Administrator?Dave Baker
Sr. Technology Consultant?Mary Williams
Background: Central Medical Group
One of MCG's larger clients is the 560-bed Central Medical Group (CMG)?a nonprofit managed health care organization that provides an entire spectrum of health care services, including health insurance, primary care, and specialty care. Along with a primary care facility and teaching hospital, physicians and affiliated staff travel to more than 60 satellite primary care clinics to provide medical coverage across a 15-county region in the state of Minnesota. CMG is affiliated with specialty clinics and medical networks for pharmacy, dental, and employee assistance counseling services. CMG is presently considering expansion into additional counties in Minnesota and may be interested in branching into western Wisconsin and northern Iowa to provide a broader range of coverage for its members. Its mission as a nonprofit organization is to provide the community and regions that they serve with high-quality, cost-effective, accessible health care.
Central Medical Group's IT department consists of about 70 people. The department is broken up into a technical services group and an application development group. Project managers, business analysts, and application developers are within the application development group. Software applications (primarily .NET and informatics data warehousing) that are developed in-house are also supported by the same developers who built the applications.
Technical services contains a database and applications team, an infrastructure team, and a quality control team, each with a department manager. Quality control consists of testing and defect management, test data management, and internal auditing/compliance. Infrastructure includes disaster recovery planning, desktop support, security, and data center management. Database and applications consists of EDI coordination, database administration, data and code migrations, and application support for third-party purchased applications and tools. EDI coordination is an important role with claims processing and enrollment integration with 80 trading partners, 3,000 providers, secured transactions, and approximately 5 million electronic claims per year.
From CMG's perspective, Minnesota Consulting Group handles telecommunications installation, after-hours support to handle telecommunications issues, and staff augmentation to support the infrastructure team by adding resources for special, unstaffed data center or disaster recovery projects. Staff augmentation can also provide support coverage for 2?3 months when staff turnover occurs. Minnesota Consulting Group has provided these services for 3 years through an annual support contract along with statements of work for project and staff augmentation. As CMG IT staff gains expertise and additional personnel, an annual evaluation is held to determine whether or not to renew MCG services for the following year. MCG won this work through a competitive bid process, and Central Medical Group is not planning to replace MCG with another vendor but may bring those services completely in-house as CMG continues to grow and mature.
CMG?s IT Department: Key Personnel for this Scenario (out of 70 people)
VP of Technology?Fred Moore
Director of Technical Services?Brian Walters
Manager of Database/Applications?Jim Hanson
Lead Database Administrator?Diane Lau
Manager of Infrastructure?Julie Nelson
Lead System Administrator?Toby Johnson
External Forces Driving Projects
Regarding governance, risk, and compliance, both MCG and CMG have been recently focused on Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) policies and HIPAA 4010 compliance. However, CMG is taking steps to prepare for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) Model Audit Rule (MAR) compliance in 2010. The Model Audit Rule is similar to the Sarbanes Oxley Act, with an expanded focus on key business process controls, general computer controls, and the financial reporting process.
Both organizations are adding additional resources in the areas of governance, auditing, and process redesign for compliance. HIPAA 5010 updates are planned for 2009, and ICD-10 updates are planned for 2010. State government programs and mandates also create business opportunities along with operational challenges with responding to those mandates. CMG is systematically improving its internal processes and is planning to be more proactive than reactive in handling work assignments around infrastructure improvements.
Infrastructure, Network, and Application Architecture
Medical claims processing and insurance operations is the most dynamic part of the operation, and you will focus your time on those areas. The primary database platform is primarily Oracle running under AIX with some SQL servers running under NT based on third-party application purchases that only run under NT. Application and Web servers are NT servers with VMware (roughly 50 processors) running under Microsoft Windows. VMware has demonstrated some clear advantages for this organization, but one of the challenges with VMware is that SQL server software vendors want to run their application on their own hardware instead of a virtual machine. A storage area network (SAN) environment is used to provide direct access storage at about 3,000 Gb, and it is operating at near (85%) capacity.
The current environment consists of development (sized at about 30% of production), disaster recovery/operational recovery servers, and production servers. The business area consists of about 300 Wintel desktop and laptop computers. The VP of Technology is interested in replacing AIX with Linux and is considering some proof of concept projects to explore that option.
Project Overview
You are a principal consultant for Minnesota Consulting Group, and this is your first assignment in which you will be responsible for the entire client engagement. The environment is consultant friendly but dynamic, with frequent organizational and business changes. CMG is a growing organization, and staff reductions are not being discussed, so morale is high. However, 25% of the technical services department has been with CMG for less than 1 year because of that growth. The training budget is respectable, and everyone has typically 5?10 days annually planned for training. Process improvements and document management could be expanded to help the teams handle the increased business volume, an increasing need for governance, and the expansion of individual and team responsibilities.
The organization has some plans to become even more diverse with a tentative acquisition of a pharmacy benefit plan system. Discussions are at the preliminary stages, but this could provide integration opportunities along with the potential to sell ownership shares of a pharmacy benefit plan to other regional nonprofit entities that did not provide pharmacy benefits to their members.
Also, CMG is considering expansion into other markets, and its current environment and infrastructure may not be sized appropriately to handle the increase in both staff and membership that a new market would bring. Direct growth through acquiring another smaller medical claims and insurance entity is not currently being considered, but the management team is open to the possibility if the right opportunity became available. Again, this organization is nonprofit, but it is run in a businesslike manner regarding cost containment and providing quality service for CMG members. Geographical growth is a part of the organization?s long-term goals and objectives to extend services to those members.
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In this assignment, you will be in the role of Dave Baker, the Senior System Administrator from Minnesota Consulting Group (MCG). In a 1?2-page report, do the following:
Explain the OSI reference model and TCP/IP protocol architecture.
Explain the similarities and differences between them.
Explain the importance of using a layered model.
Differentiate between a confirmed service and a nonconfirmed service with respect to service primitives.
