CIOs of companies depend on various tools to augment workforce performance and reduce IT costs. Advanced collaboration technologies, and mobile, cloud and network solutions provide an intelligent infrastructure that can enhance social collaboration among employees. It is imperative for companies to transform the way people work as they upgrade to a new operating system. This will help optimize their digital assets and also the collaboration methods.
Accenture (News - Alert) and Avanade have joined hands to implement a new suite of collaborative workplace technologies for Standard Life, as part of its digital workplace strategic program. Standard Life is striving to improve workforce efficiency, agility and productivity and the new technologies are expected to streamline Standard Life’s IT services, covering all its business interests in Europe, North America and Asia.
Its employees will benefit from a consolidated, enhanced and digitally-enabled working environment. This initiative was launched to help grow the business and also to cut operating costs.
The workplace technologies enabled by Accenture and Avanade include the upgrade of the operating system from Windows XP to Windows 7 for nearly 11,000 desktops. The global initiative also included migration to a single mail platform and the introduction of various collaboration tools to improve productivity. The training of Standard Life employees in six different business units in 14 countries was also undertaken.
Paul Chong, Director of Group IT at Standard Life said, “The implementation of Digital Workplace allowed us to reduce our application estate by 60 percent, cut log-in time by 15 minutes and increase our pace of work through better collaboration.”
Standard Life is now able to improve customer engagement, a vital requisite of its digital agenda. To achieve this, the company leveraged Accenture’s experience in workplace transformation services and industry knowledge, and Avanade’s expertise in implementing Microsoft (News - Alert) technology.
The new business model built for Standard Life has helped it to completely redesign the way work is done. Standard Life provides long-term savings and investments and employs about 8,500 people internationally.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson