Escaping from Legacy Systems
The Situation
A major UK Financial Services company had undertaken an in-depth study into its legacy systems. The estate had grown significantly as a result of acquisitions and mergers and had become costly from both an operational and administrative perspective. A decision was made to outsource over 2.8m closed book policies to a third party administration system via a series of data migrations and process changes over a 3-year period..
The Task
My role was to head up the planning and execution of all the I.T-related tasks. This involved recruiting a specialist team, ensuring subject matter experts were available when required, managing the third party supplier as well as ensuring all the security and infrastructure changes were planned and implemented. I also had to ensure that all source-to-target data mapping was completed on schedule, cutover and migration plans were in place, any new software was developed as required and the management of two major offshore suppliers.
The Action / Approach
I ensured that all plans were synchronised and complete, negotiated the availability of the expert resource from a matrix organisation, kept the existing show on the road by managing all mandatory changes to the to be migrated systems as well as the day to day management of 6 programme managers who were responsible for Finance, Customer Experience, Mainframe Systems, Configuration Management, Capability Management and On-Line. I also had to contact ex-employees and ask them to come back on a contract basis as all the old systems knowledge had been either let go or retired – remarkably everyone agreed. I was also a member of the Executive Steering Committee to assure the board that all technology changes were in hand.
The Result
–Value was delivered by;
- Enabling competitive differentiation and increasing market share
- Improved business agility and ability to rapidly respond to change and opportunity
- Effective delivery against financial targets
- Viable, scalable and actionable roadmap to deliver innovation and change
Pains relieved included;
- Inefficient or misaligned operating model and lack of business agility
- Unclear business strategy and requirements
- Misaligned goals across business and silos
- Poor data strategy resulting in siloed, incomplete and poor quality data
The pension admin. costs to customers was halved as a result of the many data migrations and we were given an award by the Aviva Life global enterprise for the contribution made to business strategy for closed-book products.
The programme acted as a launchpad for decommissioning 300 systems, removing the reliance on experts in old technology, multi-million pound saving in licencing costs and a more focused customer service for the migrated products.
Focus In On: Responsible for Innovation
New Areas of Value:
Enabling competitive differentiation and increasing market share
Improved business agility and ability to rapidly respond to change and opportunity
Increase customer acquisition, advocacy and lifetime value
Successful, timely delivery of evidence based transformative change
Effective delivery against financial targets
Viable, scalable and actionable roadmap to deliver innovation and change
Increased credibility, confidence and influence across the business
Improvements around:
Inefficient or misaligned operating model and lack of business agility
Lack of appropriate capabilities, skills, tools and methods
Unclear business strategy and requirements
Lack of customer insight
Misaligned goals across business and silos
Poor data strategy resulting in siloed, incomplete and poor quality data
Lack of clarity around the internal business ecosystem
