BCBSND advances employee skills and customer experience

Website: https://www.bcbsnd.com 

Employees: 800+

Industry: Health Insurance

Location: North Dakota, United States

Revenue: Not-for-profit

Learners: 180+ (rolling cohorts, launched 2024)

For over 85 years, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota (BCBSND) has been a trusted name in health insurance, serving communities in North Dakota with a deep commitment to advancing health outcomes, affordability, and access across the state. As an employer of choice, they realised that actively investing in future-proofing their workforce is key to recruiting and retaining a successful team. And that’s where data confidence, literacy, and enablement come into the picture as strategic imperatives.

Let’s unpack how BCBSND is investing in employees for long-term success.

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The challenge

BCBSND recognised that success in their future will be won through teams who can deliver on trust, transparency, and tech-enabled transformation. But to get there, the entire organisation, at every level, has to elevate its relationship with data. This led to a plan to invest in their employees and help them enhance their skills to create a more attractive and supportive work environment for both current and prospective team members in North Dakota.

As Ylan Kazi, Chief Data and AI Officer shared:

“We need to ensure every employee, not just our data scientists, have the tools to ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, and use data to drive better decisions.”

Across the organisation, several opportunities were identified to achieve these ambitions.

Executive & leadership

There is enthusiasm about data’s role in the organisation’s mission and BCBSND has made significant strides in enhancing their data-driven practice. Their decision-making was moving to a problem-first or hypothesis-driven approach, ensuring that data  supported each step in the process. A culture of learning and innovation sets a strong example for the rest of the organisation to follow.

Data SMEs

Skilled subject matter experts across departments who produce reporting and analytics and were looking to turn insights into action. BCBSND focused on integrating the all-important “so what” into all data interactions, reporting and requests.

The wider business

There was an exciting opportunity to establish a unified data language across functions.

Business had the chance to better understand how data could be integrated into their work. By relying on evidence over gut feel and anecdotal information, decisions could be more informed and impactful.

BCBSND employees also faced macro-pressures reshaping healthcare, from increasing costs and new regulations, to the personalisation imperative and the rise of AI. To meet these changes head- on, leaders need to build a more adaptive, data-fluent workforce that can balance compliance, compassion, and innovation.

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The solution

BCBSND knew a cookie-cutter approach wouldn’t deliver the impact they envisioned. They needed a fully tailored, multi-layered education strategy designed to deliver transformation at scale. They chose to partner with Data Literacy Academy for help with change management, embedded learning, and working toward measurable business outcomes.

Change Management

As a crucial first step in the rollout, BCBSND implemented a structured, two-month Change Management programme designed to lay the cultural and strategic groundwork for long-term success. This phase focused on equipping leaders with the mindset and communication tools to champion transformation from the top. Through targeted 1:1 engagements, storytelling assets, and carefully curated messaging, the initiative aligned senior stakeholders around a shared vision for data fluency. It also surfaced key business use cases to ensure the learning journey was grounded in real, high-impact challenges. By prioritising change management before formal learning began, BCBSND ensured that education wasn’t viewed as a tickbox training initiative, but as a critical lever for enterprise-wide evolution.

‍Executive & leadership engagement

While learners get certified through online education, nothing beats sitting at the table with leaders to create a deeper understanding and commitment. By opening up conversations through in-person executive leadership workshops in the Fargo Headquarters, they delved deeper into opportunities and challenges as a team. This was followed by a focused ‘Data-Driven Leader’ course, ensuring that senior stakeholders led from the front.

Data SME engagement

Across all departments, SMEs with a high motivation to grow and learn were supported through four in-depth modules over the course of 6 months. This empowered them to become internal champions of insight-to-action.

BCBSND’s roll-out also included:

• Community building and cohort learning

• Customised content that mapped directly to the needs of BCBSND
• ROI tracking aligned to business impact and use case development
• Upcoming workshops and reinforcement sprints for sustained behaviour change

BCBSND’s approach focused on transforming their culture rather than zooming in on one tool or training, as they knew that wouldn’t move the needle effectively. The results have led to people feeling empowered to move from descriptive reports to proactive problem-solving, from Excel wrangling to dynamic dashboards, and from uncertainty to clarity.

Business Users

To ensure meaningful change, the day-to-day reality of business users needs to shift. Because of the customised learning pathways based on capability, the certifications helped demystify data for non-technical roles by connecting learning directly to their functional responsibilities and the member experience. Customised content, real-world use cases, and cross-functional cohort design enabled employees in Finance, Operations, Health Delivery, and Brand Strategy to see how data could drive impact in their roles. Business users now have tools to challenge assumptions, frame better questions, and adopt a problem-first mindset. This approach helped shift the perception of data from a technical skillset to a strategic enabler, integral to decision-making, innovation, and a member-centric approach.

The results

Over 90% of learners reported greater confidence in using data to inform decisions,

shared they were now more likely to adopt Tableau in their work, and felt better equipped to build dashboards, tell data stories, and communicate insights to stakeholders.

Across the organisation, employees from Finance, Health Delivery, Brand Strategy, and Ops have:

• Reduced manual workflows and increased automation
• Built confidence in self-serve capabilities
• Applied storytelling to increase impact and engagement

This shows that people are already thinking more critically and creatively about data, have a better understanding of what data is needed for the research they are doing and are feeling confident to apply this new knowledge in their roles.

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Looking ahead

BCBSND continues to empower its employees to grow their skills as they involve more people in the programme, thus reinforcing its commitment to becoming a fully data-guided organisation.

With champions in every team, leadership fully engaged, and use cases already delivering value, Blue Cross Blue Shield North Dakota is demonstrating a steadfast commitment to investing in its employees and their skills.