Insurance firmSkandiahas cleared a backlog of more
than 1,000 software maintenance tasks in seven months after
starting anoutsourcing contract with Indian IT firm
HCL.
The contract, which began in February, covers nearly all of
Skandia's application development, IT maintenance and
infrastructure. Skandia retained control of systems architecture,
business analysis, security and supplier management.
Tim Mann, Skandia's customer services and technology director,
said the intention was to increase the delivery of project work.
"The maintenance backlog was getting in the way of that, so HCL's
effort to clear it was an early and very tangible indicator of the
overall benefits of the contract," he said.
Mann said Skandia signed the deal to improve margins, cut costs,
reduce the range of technologies used, and to focus its IT staff on
value-adding activity rather than maintenance.
Catherine Tye, Skandia's head of vendor management, said the
contract allowed Skandia to restructure its IT department.
Previously it had about 295 roles filled by 140 permanent staff and
155 contractors. Now the headcount has halved, but the number of
business analysts has risen from 15 to 100.
Mann said Skandia was good at designing systems and managing
relationships. "We were good but not world-class in software
development, so we felt we would rather work with a partner," he
said.
Skandia settled on HCL for four reasons: capacity,
standards-driven software development, cost savings, and, after
several trips to India, the interpersonal relationship that
developed, said Mann.
"HCL had an engineering-oriented approach, and a detailed way of
getting information. Also, we never felt they would try to upsell
us," he said.
Skandia's core application is a policy management system, which
runs on IBM iSeries servers.