CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY Nordea saves 3.5 million with enhanced application portfolio management CUSTOMER PROFILE Industry: Financial services Company: Nordea Bank Employees: 30,000 Total assets: 581 billion BUSINESS Nordea provides a range of banking services and life and pension products for 11 million customers in the Nordic and Baltic regions of Europe. The company has a network of 1,400 branches and 30,000 employees. CHALLENGE By rationalising its application portfolio Nordea recognised it could reduce operating costs and improve business agility. To succeed, it needed a solution to facilitate smarter and faster application portfolio decisions. SOLUTION CA Clarity PPM (Project & Portfolio Management) tracks cost and quality data for 3,300 business applications. Nordea uses this data to help define and deliver the right strategy for the future of its application portfolio. BENEFIT Simplifying portfolio management has helped Nordea save 3.5 million by identifying 150 applications for retirement. Application rationalisation has also optimised system life-cycle management and enhanced business agility. agility made possible
Business Providing financial services to 11 million customers in Europe Nordea is one of the largest financial services companies operating in the Nordic and Baltic regions of Europe. It provides corporate, merchant, retail and private banking services, plus life and pension products to more than 11 million customers. Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Nordea manages 142 billion in assets and has a network of more than 1,400 branches and call centres staffed by 30,000 employees. Nordea s vision is to be a great European bank, widely acknowledged for its people and ability to create superior value for customers and shareholders. Challenge Reducing cost through application rationalisation Following the economic downturn, many financial services organisations such as Nordea have renewed their focus on optimising their IT cost structure, not only to minimise costs, but to also importantly maintain Nordea s agility to react rapidly to changing market conditions, comply with new legislation and launch new financial products and services quickly. Our existing application register system was out of date and did not contain the information we needed. Michael Steffensen Head of Group IT Business Support, Nordea As part of a major IT transformation program, aimed at achieving these goals, Nordea identified that rationalising its application portfolio could result in significant cost savings. Michael Steffensen, Head of Group IT Business Support, comments, Nordea has been involved in a number of mergers and acquisitions over the years, which had resulted in a vast application portfolio that included numerous duplications. 02
The current, non-rationalised, application portfolio not only created higher licensing and support costs, but also slowed down the decision-making and Nordea s business agility impacting both innovation and time-to-market. Integration and data conversion issues meant that delivering new services and system functionality to staff and customers was complex and time-consuming, adds Steffensen. To reduce costs and enhance flexibility, Nordea embarked on an application rationalisation program known as TAPAS (Total Application Portfolio Assessment). To initially support this initiative, Nordea was using a basic application register, but this did not offer the level of detail or functionality required. Steffensen comments, Our existing application register system was out of date and did not contain the information we needed to make strategic decisions around the future of our business systems. Solution A consistent framework for evaluating and optimising the value of the application portfolio To gain better insight into its application portfolio, Nordea implemented CA Clarity PPM (Project & Portfolio Management). The CA Technologies solution selected by Nordea also offered the functionality and flexibility needed to facilitate its TAPAS initiative. CA Services assisted with the implementation. CA Services had the specialised knowledge and experience to help us deploy and configure CA Clarity PPM quickly to meet our needs, comments Steffensen. It also helped us integrate the solution with our legacy application register and migrate relevant data. Nordea uses the CA Productivity Accelerator for CA Clarity PPM (Project & Portfolio Management) as an online training platform to educate users. The Web-based approach to training has proved very successful and resulted in faster user adoption, adds Steffensen. CA Clarity PPM is used to track all 3,300 business applications, including banking systems, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and human resources and accounting applications. The CA Technologies solution acts as a central repository for both quantitative and qualitative data, such as: Application costs and facts Technical quality Functional quality Business value Strategic value. These criteria form the basis for a consistent framework for assessing applications. CA Clarity PPM is configured with an algorithm to calculate an application score, based upon which the responsible IT unit, together with its business counterpart, can make an informed decision as to whether to retire, keep as-is, upgrade, improve or replace an application, explains Steffensen. 03
CA Clarity PPM is configured with an algorithm to calculate an application score. Michael Steffensen Head of Group IT Business Support, Nordea In addition to the TAPAS team, more than 100 staff within Nordea such as system analysts, planning managers and system architects access CA Clarity PPM to enable them to make decisions and allocate resources based on the future of an application. Although the CA Technologies project and portfolio management solution is currently only being used to manage business applications, Nordea plans to use TAPAS to evaluate around 1,500 infrastructure applications later this year. Benefit Reduced costs and enhanced business agility Using CA Clarity PPM (Project & Portfolio Management) has made it much easier and more efficient for Nordea to assess and manage its application portfolio on an ongoing basis. The CA Technologies PPM solution provides comprehensive visibility of application details to support the TAPAS project and enables greater governance, comments Steffensen. It also acts as a tool for communication between business and IT to ensure an open dialogue is maintained and that application decisions are supported by all key personnel. As a result of the TAPAS project, Nordea has been able to: Identify 150 applications to retire, resulting in cost savings of 3.5 million Simplify IT support and maintenance Enhance business agility to enable faster implementation of new services, a rapid response to market changes and simplified compliance with new legislation. 04
3.5 million is just the start of the potential cost savings from the TAPAS project, comments Steffensen. We expect this to increase to around 10 to 15 percent of our total application maintenance costs within the next few years which could be up to 20 million. 3.5 million in cost savings resulting from the TAPAS project so far Copyright 2011 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. The information and results illustrated here are based upon the speaker s experiences with the referenced software product in a variety of environments, which may include production and nonproduction environments. Past performance of the software products in such environments is not necessarily indicative of the future performance of such software products in identical, similar or different environments. CA does not provide legal advice. Neither this document nor any software product referenced herein serves as a substitute for your compliance with any laws (including but not limited to any act, statute, regulation, rule, directive, standard, policy, administrative order, executive order, and so on (collectively, Laws )) referenced herein or any contract obligations with any third parties. You should consult with competent legal counsel regarding any such Laws or contract obligations. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document as is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages. 05