Inside Standard Life's IT strategy

Scottish financial services group Standard Life has lifted the lid on the IT strategy it will use to weather the economic downturn of the next few years.

The company is currently undergoing a root and branch reinvention - an overhaul it began five years ago, as it emerged from the tail end of the last economic downturn and one that will be ongoing in some areas of the business for at least the next three years.

In 2004, the company concluded its business model of high capital investment for a low return had made it vulnerable in the lean early years of this decade.

As a result, it embarked on a new low-investment, high-margin business model that had to be underpinned by a highly efficient IT department.

According to group IT director Keith Young and his executive team, the IT strategy has been supported by a number of pillars, including aligning it closely with the business mission, attracting and retaining the best staff, embracing development methodologies, principally Agile, and building a service oriented architecture (SOA).

Fundamental to the company's business mission for the last five years has been a drive for "operational excellence" driven by systems run over a SOA platform. Young said the SOA platform allows application code to be reused, saving the department £24m since the architecture was adopted in 2004.

This milking of IT assets is also a lynchpin of the company's drive into new markets. Standard Life currently operates in Canada, Germany, Ireland, Hong Kong and the UK, with joint ventures in China and India. It intends to expand into new areas, using an IT-system-in-a-box approach similar to that of Tesco. Under such a system, only aspects such as language, currency and tax regulations need to be adapted for the new country.

Standard Life's IT strategy also sees the company working hard to retain the best staff.

One of the props of such a strategy is the adoption of Agile, a process methodology designed to strip out waste in the design process which sees development teams go through a relatively high number of software iterations before a product is released.

Standard Life teams also hold regular 'scrum' sessions...

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