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By Tim Ferguson, 6 July 2009 17:01

INTERVIEW

...the first fruits of the project will be seen in the bank's savings products, which are due to switch to the SAP platform in the first quarter of 2010. Other banking services will move to the platform towards the end of that year.

Stafford said: "The main emphasis in the first year of the Voyager programme was to analyse the changes that will be needed. There are around 250 interfaces into our current systems that we've needed to consider and this influenced our thinking when it came to designing and building the team responsible for making these changes."

The other major objective behind Voyager, according to Stafford, is to give business divisions greater autonomy from the IT department when they want to create products, by employing an SOA-type model.

"We've done a good job of decoupling a lot of functionality and putting in a Microsoft Services layer, similar to an SOA model. Long term, we're competing against some big players who also have significant scale, so we need to increase our business process automation and continue lowering our cost base," he explained.

This work will have several knock-on effects such as shorter timescales for bringing new financial products to market. Stafford said this is because the business will have to worry less about the tech implications of new products and more about designing the product and then marketing it.

Back office processes will also be improved as a result of the Voyager project. Stafford said: "Our processes are now tightly coupled with our back office. So the process to offer someone a mortgage is more efficient. Similarly, there are more automated processes around savings and tighter integration to handle customer queries."

Stafford said his main role with Voyager has been to make sure the business's IT is up to the challenge of supporting the project.

"We've really had to accelerate the pace of change within IT in order to support the level of business change demanded by the rest of the organisation. This has meant increasing our proficiency for managing projects and programmes," he added.

Voyager isn't the only project taking up Stafford's time. He's also been busy overseeing extensive system integration to bring recent acquisitions into the fold.

In January this year - six months ahead of schedule - Stafford's team completed the integration of Nationwide's IT systems with the Portman Building Society, which Nationwide acquired in the autumn of 2007.

Stafford explained: "We've moved all Portman Building Society hardware to our Nationwide datacentres and decommissioned many of their systems. There's been a strong focus on delivering the benefits from the merger with the Portman."

As for Nationwide's merger with the Derbyshire and Cheshire building societies, which was announced in September 2008, the organisation is taking a different approach compared to Portman.

Stafford said: "Our current strategy is not to fully integrate the Cheshire, Derbyshire and Dunfermline building societies. We're running them as separate regional brands so they're maintaining their own IT. However, we have established network links along with some back office systems that we'll share."

Another area that Stafford's team has been focusing on is...

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