Oxford was, I understand, just acquired by United Health.
I remember the first day I walked into Oxford, and the VP of IT told me in the elevator ride up that "Pick will be gone in two years". That was 1993. He was sort of right; they went to UniVerse somewhere between 95 & 96.
In addition to not billing the individual members, they totally lost sight of their costs; the Oracle Financials didn't work (or, at least, somewhere along the chain, something was broke). So they had an invisible hole in revenue as well as an invisible hole in payables at the precise moment that one the former was falling and the latter was rising.
Still, after the crash, they got their (expletive deleted) together. The system is well-tuned, there's a solid UniVerse DBA group, Matt Augustine knows where his towel is, SDLC is practiced, and there are tech leads and tech reviews to ensure that programming standards are in place and enforced. The last thing I did before I left for the last time ( I came & went 4 times; one way they shot themselves in the foot was to periodically let all contractors go, resulting in the loss of hundreds of years of institutional knowledge), in 2001, was a line-by-line analysis of the adjudicator. This was supposed to be the first step in re-engineering, and the talent they had on site at that point was quite capable of doing a solid job of it.
So, perhaps the moral is, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Then you get acquired...
"Our greatest duty in this life is to help others. And please, if you can't help them, could you at least not hurt them?" - H.H. the Dalai Lama
"When buying & selling are controlled by legislation, the first thing to be bought & sold are the legislators" - P.J. O'Rourke
Dan Fitzgerald
From: "Dawn M. Wolthuis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: RE: [U2] Companies going belly up converting from PICK/MV Date: Sun, 16 May 2004 17:39:02 -0500
I found several hits when googling
Oxford-Health Oracle fiasco
Is there a particularly good write-up on this story that anyone can recommend?
I still thought I read about companies that ended up going under (perhaps VARs) when attempting to migrate from MV/PICK to SQL-based DBMS's.
Thanks. --dawn
Dawn M. Wolthuis Tincat Group, Inc. www.tincat-group.com
Take and give some delight today.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-u2-
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Allen Egerton
> Sent: Sunday, May 16, 2004 4:45 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [U2] Companies going belly up converting from PICK/MV
>
> On Sun, 16 May 2004 09:05:37 -0500, you wrote:
>
> >I've tried to search the archives for some old postings and have been
> >unsuccessful, so sorry for asking for previously posted info.
> >
> >I'm looking for information related to companies that moved or attempted
> to
> >move from applications based on MV to Oracle or other relational
> databases
> >and went belly up in the process.
> >
> >Thanks for any anecdotes or info you can pass along or point me to. --
> dawn
>
> Not belly up, but you can't leave Oxford Health Plans out.
>
> Anecdote:
> Million dollar bonus for transferring data from Universe to Oracle
> tables if done over the weekend. Not happening fast enough. "Drop
> the constraints". Bonus received. Tables full of garbage.
>
> --
> Allen Egerton
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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