Nationwide

Nationwide’s agile digital workplace helps deliver on ‘Simply Brilliant Service’ promise

Nationwide provides digital tools to hybrid workforce to support ‘customer first’ behaviors

With more than 16 million members, Nationwide is the largest building society. As such, the organization strives to run its business in the most responsible way possible to benefit its members, employees, communities, and the environment by fulfilling its purpose — to help people save for and buy homes of their own.

To get there, Nationwide has created a Blueprint for a Modern Mutual. One of its strategic drivers is ‘Focused, Fit and Fast’. To make good on that promise, Nationwide continually invests in its technology estate "both to respond to the evolving needs of our members and to ensure future service resilience. [...] This means providing the workforce with the 'digital' tools they need to deliver great customer service."

Windows 10: From migration project to BAU process

Nationwide successfully migrated to Windows 10, but it faced a new challenge: adopting Microsoft's Evergreen release cadence. This would allow it to deliver OS changes in a more agile, low-cost, and flexible way while still meeting its critical business objectives.

The Evergreen release cadence is a continuous delivery model that allows organizations to receive new features and security updates regularly. This can help organizations stay up-to-date with the latest security patches and features while also reducing the cost and complexity of managing their IT environment.

The goal: automating 95% of deployments to achieve 100% compliance on a comfortable schedule

To achieve this goal, the operations team used Juriba to automate the OS upgrade from scheduling and deployment to monitoring. According to Andrew Cooper, Release & Protect Manager, End User Services, this meant that the team could comfortably meet its commitment to upgrading 95% of end-users to Windows 10 within six months, whilst allowing ample time to tackle the final 5% of devices, which are notorious for being the toughest to remediate.

Departing from a traditional project-led approach has allowed Nationwide to maintain its desktop estate on an increased yearly OS upgrade cadence with an operations team that is one-third the size of the original migration team.

Delivering a better user experience with every iteration

Using Juriba, Nationwide conducted thousands of activities across multiple programs, delivering a better user experience while building the capability to adapt flexibly to changing business demands. With every upgrade cycle, the team further improved the process by adopting additional Juriba capabilities to automate tedious manual jobs by transforming them into intelligent workflows, such as automated email communication and self-service capabilities.

Nationwide's experience shows that it is possible to adopt a continuous delivery model for OS upgrades without disrupting business operations. By implementing Juriba, Nationwide was able to achieve their goals of improved compliance, reduced costs, and improved security.

The Solution

Clear insight is the first step to efficient digital workplace management

Nationwide is a company with a proud history of technical innovation: introducing their first computer system in 1966; trialing Iris recognition technology as a secure method of identification; being one of the first financial organizations to have a website; followed in 1997 by their launch of the UKs first retail Internet banking service.

Today, Nationwide uses a large set of applications to support its members and employees. To maintain a modern, secure, and supportable desktop estate, a variety of data sets are required to regularly test updates and safely schedule deployments to critical business units.

One of the key benefits of Juriba is that it allows organizations to create a single, authoritative inventory of their applications. By using Juriba, Nationwide was able to create a more accurate picture of their installed base. This allowed them to minimize the housekeeping tasks associated with managing their application inventory and enable faster, more informed decisions for application rationalization and management.

The Result

Real-world conditions change; deadlines don't

Nationwide is a large and ever-evolving organization. As a result, their business conditions often change dramatically. This can make it difficult to plan and execute IT upgrades.

In the past, Nationwide had to adapt their upgrade plans constantly to accommodate changes in their business environment. For example, they recently adopted a matrix-style organization. This change needed to be reflected in their Windows 10 upgrade, as it affected their Windows ring assignment.

Despite these challenges, Nationwide was still able to meet their strict deadlines and compliance levels. They were able to do this by using Juriba's automation capabilities. Juriba's automation allowed Nationwide to adapt their upgrade plans quickly and easily to changes in their business environment. This helped them to keep up with the scope of their upgrade projects and meet their deadlines.

The Future

Nationwide continues to expand its digital workplace operations

Nationwide is evaluating Windows 11 using Juriba's Windows 11 Assessment Service and the new Windows 11 Deployment Project Template. This allows the team to determine the optimal upgrade path for their in-scope devices. Juriba will then automatically create custom tasks for each device according to their readiness status and chosen upgrade path, as well as assign them to the best-fit Windows deployment ring.

Nationwide is also using Juriba to complete its hardware refresh of more than 3,000 devices in just three months. With Juriba, the team knows exactly what business area each user associated with those devices lives in and what applications they depend on.

As Nationwide evolves its Digital Workplace operations, they are continuously looking for ways to react and adapt quickly to changes in technology to achieve fast, frictionless workplace management. With the continued BAU lifecycle programs running simultaneously with transformation initiatives like the upcoming Intune migration, the plan is to build on previous successes, using the Juriba platform to automate further and accelerate changes that come their way.

Nationwide's experience shows that Juriba can be a powerful tool for helping organizations to manage their IT environment. By using Juriba, Nationwide can improve their efficiency and productivity, reduce their risk of errors and delays, increase their compliance with deadlines and regulations, improve their agility and flexibility, and enhance their user experience.

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