When Petar Bojovic joined Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina three years ago, his task was to build an engineering department — and the IT infrastructure it would manage — from the ground up.
The organization had no engineering team because it had outsourced most of its IT operations: Pretty much anything that had an IP address was run by a managed service provider (MSP), he says.
“I had a unique opportunity,” says Bojovic, now director of systems engineering.
Years earlier, Blue Cross NC handed over its two data centers and many of the staff that ran them to Fujitsu, following a fashion at the time for businesses to focus on core competences and to cut costs by outsourcing what many saw as mundane tasks.
As a result, Blue Cross NC IT became little more than a vendor manager tracking KPIs: “If there was an application outage, if there were application issues, performance issues, it was not handled by Blue Cross internally. It would have been handled by the MSP,” he says.