No more spin control

23.01.2006
Medco Health Solutions Inc., a Franklin Lakes, N.J.-based Fortune 50 prescription-drug management company, has had great success with a program designed to reduce computer viruses and other IT-related problems that may affect its lines of business. As part of the program, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Kenny Klepper and other top IT and business executives meet three times a week for two hours from 15 videoconferencing sites nationwide to dissect IT problems and devise solutions to decrease system downtime. Klepper recently spoke to Computerworld's Heather Havenstein about the history of the program and its benefits.

Why was the reliability program developed? When a patient is submitting a prescription, we often have a more complete view of [his] history [than the pharmacy] because we see prescription data, medical data and lab data [that can be used] to apply better judgment in how medication is dispensed.

But if you don't have high stability and high quality of the core basic services, you can never get to those strategic discussions with the client.

Two years ago, we had a lot of reliability problems in delivering software into production. We were great at firefighting, but we tended not to spend the extra effort on prevention. We repaired and moved on.

We created this forum where we discuss every outage. What happened? Are we mobilized to get the repair done? How we can address prevention? That brings a heightened sense of accountability to key stakeholders.

About 18 months after we started, we had dropped defects that made it into production by 98 percent. Now we have good metrics around application failures.