Widows Stays Strong

After its demutualization and acquisition by Lloyds TSB, Scottish Widows strives toward strength, reliability and innovation.

IT Strategy Map

Additionally, in an effort to keep technologists on track with Scottish Widows' business goals, the insurer has begun using an IT strategy map that is aligned with the carrier's corporate strategy map and checked through a Balanced Scorecard approach. This strategy ensures that "We are all pointing in the same direction in terms of supporting financial and franchise growth, customer and service quality, risk management, and people objectives," asserts Deas. "The map describes our aims and breaks them down into a number of categories."

The top priorities on Scottish Widows' corporate strategy map include growing market share and increasing shareholder value, enhancing efficiency and managing risk. "Every business line must work out their own strategy" for accomplishing these goals, says Deas. "IT's key areas of focus include measures for all individuals within IT." As a result, IT performance reviews take place on a quarterly basis. During these reviews, an inventory of contributions is taken and personnel are encouraged to discuss the types of training necessary to help them get to the strategy map's final destination.

An area gaining a lot of attention from Scottish Widows' IT department is its business continuity project, which focuses on managing the carrier's risk. "In the face of a growing number of servers, the strategy includes server consolidation, hierarchical storage management, storage resource management and increasing bandwidth on our Metropolitan Area Network," Deas explains.

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Strength in Numbers

COMPANY: Scottish Widows (Edinburgh, Scotland; 77 billion pounds under management).

LINES OF BUSINESS: Life insurance, pension and investment products.

KEY EXECUTIVES: Marshall Deas, head of IT service delivery; Archie Kane, chief executive; Eric Daniels, chief executive, Lloyds TSB Group.

IT STAFF: 463

IT BUDGET: 56 million pounds.

RECENT INITIATIVES: Review of the business case for consolidation of multiple administrative systems; an overhaul of e-commerce proposition to improve development productivity and speed to market.

IT INFRASTRUCTURE: IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) mainframe and mid-range platforms; Sun Microsystems (Palo Alto, Calif.) mid-range platform; Microsoft (Redmond, Wash.) Windows NT and Novell (Provo, Utah) Netware LAN; Microsoft platform for both desktop and laptop computers; IBM ATM network and Definity telephony switching.

TECHNOLOGY PHILOSOPHY?

DEAS: "We are clear about technology not being the tail that wags the dog. Instead, business comes first and technology supports it."

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