IBS Journal September 2015
Far from putting their feet up and congratulating themselves on a job well done, the team has focused on enhancing the operational model, adapting the support structure to the new release-based environment, and cleaning up all of those areas that were untouched, for the sake of expediency, during the main initial project.
At least one year before the end of the
transformation project, which had been dubbed Voyager, the Nationwide was plan- ning for the new organisational structure to fully utilise the platform, says Mascia. Part of this was moving to a structured release model. Development was outsourced to Accenture, to replace a mix of resources from different organisations. Nationwide wanted to use Accenture’s expertise, har- ness its Bangalore-based delivery centre, and have a model whereby resources could be scaled up and down as required. Accen- ture is fully accountable for the deliverables and this route has reduced by half the cost of delivering change, he says, while the quality of the code is at its best ever. This release-based model has really
improved efficiency, says Mascia, and has been applied for a range of areas, including middleware, savings, crime and risk, opera- tions, digital banking, management informa- tion, payments, origination, finance and HR, and mortgages. Major releases are typically every eight months, with smaller ones in the interim. A lot of the change stems from the configuration of the SAP platform, he adds. Another series of post-cutover tasks
has been to ‘clean up a lot of the scaffold- ing’ around the new core platform, says Mark Kaplan, director at Accenture for financial services. Even with the Voyag- er project, there was a need to take some shortcuts, he says. An example is for state- ments, where these are still routed for printing via the old system. ‘Cleaning up
a lot of the background mess’ has been a prime goal since going live. There is also the need to ensure that the
new environment is always available, and this is where Nationwide had a blip. In July 2014, there had been a major upgrade of the SAP system. ‘In the last moments after a long [Saturday] night, we tried to bring the channels up,’ says Kaplan. The outage had an impact on 200,000 internet banking transac- tions and 240,000 mobile transactions. ATMs were also impacted and only the branch channel emerged unscathed because it is not open on a Sunday. ‘It was a minor tech- nical issue but it caused a very big impact,’ he says. No data was lost or corrupted but it took twelve minutes for the first tweets and 25 minutes for the first calls from the media, with calls from the regulators coming not long after this. The number of calls to the Nationwide nearly doubled on the Sunday and there were 1215 related tweets and 399 facebook posts. The problem was rectified at 6pm on Sunday evening. In response to the problems, Nation- wide has set up a dedicated deployment function. It seeks to now mitigate the busi- ness impact as well, including having a Twit- ter team on standby in case there are issues. In addition, it is looking at a different way of doing upgrades. Previously, the upgrades were done from midnight on Saturday into the early hours of Sunday, with a major SAP upgrade taking around seven and a half hours. There was a ‘cool down’ period, where the society ‘closed the front door’ and then
waited for all of the customers to leave the internet and mobile channels. The chan- nels would then be disconnected, the work would be carried out, and then the channels would be reconnected, at which point the queued transactions would be processed (ATMs and credit cards can still be used but with the balances at the point at which the system was taken down; the internet, tele- phone and mobile banking channels are shutdown because it is felt that the absence of the current accounts makes these too downgraded to be of use). There might be a way to take, say, 40
minutes off the 7.5 hours upgrade time but Nationwide is looking at a more radical approach, being ‘fast followers’ where anoth- er high-profile SAP customer, Canada-based ATB, has led. This is using SAP’s upgrade mod- el that allows any ‘protected services’ that will be impacted by a new release to be done in a parallel ‘bridge’, which shares the main database with the live system, and with those portions then brought into the live environ- ment when ready. Nationwide has achieved a lot over the
last few years with its systems overhaul but it is clear that this remains a ‘work in progress’. Far from putting their feet up and congrat- ulating themselves on a job well done, the team has focused on enhancing the oper- ational model, adapting the support struc- ture to the new release-based environment, and cleaning up all of those areas that were untouched, for the sake of expediency, dur- ing the main initial project.
© IBS Intelligence 2015
www.ibsintelligence.com
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point of view: nationwide
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