At Teradata's annual Partners conference this week, Christine John, systems engineer and Paul Johnson, infrastructure leader with Nationwide Insurance, explained how they were able to build out a shared services infrastructure across the enterprise, and enable five different business lines to tap into common data services supported by a data warehouse.
The initiative came about in 2006, following a spate of claims arising from a stormy year among many policyholders, in which management recognized a need to streamline and optimize its data reporting, John says. The company's P&C, loan, specialized insurance, financial services and consulting previously ran their own operational applications and data, including financials, HR and CRM.
The shared services initiative brought together these functional areas into a single enterprise realm. “Shared services takes the vertical and makes it horizontal,” John says. Additionally, she said her unit provides support for the underlying technical components of the shared services, including tactical operations, including meeting service level agreements, and partnering with networking, backup and data management specialists to address issues that come up.
One of the most popular interfaces among internal business clients, John says, is a “heat map” her unit provides that shows spikes in activities across a given month. The infrastructure is now supported by two development, two test and two production systems, Johnson says.
Getting five different business organizations to come together and agree to a shared services infrastructure is not without its challenges, of course. Aligning and syncing development and resources meant considerable collaboration and communication between these businesses.
“Just because you've completed your task on time, you still may end up waiting for another team to complete their task,” John says.
Kudos to the presenters for what was a highly engaging session as well. Knowing it was an end-of-the-day session, they charged things up by presenting in Ohio State University (where else, right?) football jerseys, and throwing out random trivia questions to the audience. Winners had a complimentary Nationwide foam football tossed their way. Yes, they love their football in Ohio.
This originally appeared on Insurance Networking News.
Joe McKendrick is an independent consultant, author, blogger and frequent contributor to Insurance Networking News specializing in information technology. He can be reached at joe@mckendrickresearch.com.
Be the first to comment on this post using the section below.