Royal Liver Assurance
Making IT tick
quicker under the
Liver clock
As you would expect in an
organization which boasts one of
the most famous clocks in the UK,
time is crucial for Royal Liver
Assurance’s Information Services
(IS) department.
Royal Liver, a leading friendly society, has
been racing through the most prolific
period of change since it was founded in
1850. In 2002 it acquired the Industrial
Branch business of Irish Life (Retail)
following the acquisitions in 2000 of
Guardian Life Ireland and the Personal
Financial Services division of Friends
Provident. It now has 5 million life
assurance policies and over £2.5 billion
funds under management.
Its home is Liverpool’s best known
landmark - The Royal Liver Building that
dominates the city’s River Mersey
waterfront.
The building, topped by the legendary
Liver Birds, has a clock with four dials
each with a diameter of 25 feet - bigger
than Westminster’s Big Ben.
With the company pursuing a policy of
growth through acquisitions in the UK
and Ireland, the IS department has had
to rapidly become more dynamic to
support new business directives and
ventures that it could not have
accommodated in the past.
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assyst by AXIOS SYSTEMS
“Businesses are much more dependent on
technology these days,” summed up
Support Services Manager Donna Petrie.
“Last year email wasn’t a business-critical
application. Now if it goes down we’re
lost. The Internet is going the same
way. We’re increasingly dependent on
how these services are provided and the
timescales for providing and restoring
them.”
The culmination of the IS department’s work is its service
improvement program. “In essence this means aligning what the
IS department does to meet the business needs,” Service
Manager Nick Edwards said. “It might seem simple and obvious
but many companies’ IS departments don’t do it.”
To achieve service improvement an integrated IT Service
Management support tool was essential. “It’s not an overall
solution but a critical enabler,” Edwards added.
Royal Liver formed a selection and evaluation team to choose the
best product based on three key selection criteria:
Compliance with the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
Royal Liver required a product purpose-built to support ITIL
rather than one that had been adapted from a Help Desk
tool.
Integration
Configuration, Incident, Problem and Change Management
had to be integrated from a single source to allow
comprehensive reporting and incident life-cycle
management.
Ease and speed of implementation
Two products were shortlisted - assyst from Axios Systems
and Red Box from Fox IT. assyst was selected because of its
ease of use, features, reporting facilities, support and
strength of its existing user base.

A key decision taken at the outset of the
project was to fully implement Configuration
Management. This represented a significant
investment in time and effort but provided a
solid foundation for all subsequent ITIL
disciplines. The team had witnessed other
organizations which had seemingly made a great
deal of progress with Service Management
without full Configuration Management only to
find they had reached a point where they could
go no further without having to start again from
scratch.
“Configuration Management is the
foundation for everything else in
ITIL,” Edwards said. “It makes
Incident, Change, Problem and Release
Management possible as well as
supporting service delivery disciplines.
It can be time-consuming and onerous.
A lot of organizations skimp on it. We
don’t.”
Royal Liver’s use of the automated hardware
and software tracking tool, Discovery, shows the
state of a desktop - based on procedure,
procurement and change information - and
provides a physical validation, all from a single
source.
The society’s acquisitions meant that equipment
from organizations taken over by Royal Liver
risked being added to the database with
different naming conventions.
“We cleared the decks and re-tagged everything
with names which corresponded with assyst,”
Edwards recalled. Every single machine was
physically audited and a Discovery agent
installed on it. “There was a bit of PR involved
too,” he went on. “We were a new department
and wanted everyone to meet us.” The
database currently contains some 9,000
hardware and software configuration items.
“assyst gives us
everything we’ve ever
wanted....there’s a huge
amount of information in
there.”
Nick Edwards, Service Manager
The acquisition program also influenced the IS team’s implementation of
assyst. “We had two choices for the original audit,” Edwards explained.
“We could go externally or develop the capability internally. The costs
were similar. We developed the internal capability, knowing it would
not be a one-shot process. After we’d done it once, the next time
there was an acquisition, we’d be able to use the same resources.”
Confidentiality meant acquisitions could not be notified to staff in
advance so the team had to work to particularly tight deadlines.
Equipment had to be rationalized and sometimes moved. “That
involved a huge amount of data coming in and out of assyst
which coped very well,” Petrie said. “We had a few small
problems but they were due to server capacity.”
Change Management was put in place before the configuration
database was populated by the audit so it could be kept up to
date and linked to individual assets.
“If we hadn’t introduced Change Management initially we
wouldn’t have got the support we needed within the
organization,” Edwards commented. “The ramp-up was
gradual. The whole thing has been a culture change for
staff so we’ve been very conscious about how we’ve
managed it. Rather than wield a big stick we’ve
gone ‘softly softly’. Now we have the buy-in of
pretty much everyone.”
RL’s Service Management team is the bridge between the IS department
and the rest of the business with the Help Desk in the Royal Liver
Building forming a single central point of contact. Staffed by seven
people, it has been transformed from a call logging desk to an active
support unit resolving almost 40% of incidents at the first line. “This
would not have been possible without assyst,” Edwards said.
All IT problems are referred
to the Help Desk which has a
carefully selected knowledge
database and assigns to
specialists the calls which it
cannot resolve on the spot.
There are special support
teams for Royal Liver’s 900-
strong field force of
financial advisors - who have
their own laptops and
printers - and assurance
premium collectors who use
500 hand-held computer
devices known as ‘Electronic
Round Books’. The Desk also
raises all purchase orders for
IT equipment throughout the
organization.
“We wanted to get everyone using the Help Desk,” Petrie explained. “For
Incident Management the question was ‘OK, we’re going to have a Help Desk
but how are we going to manage everything once it’s in - how are we going
to keep the Configuration database up to date once the information has
been collected ?’. We decided to put in a Configuration database rather than
an assets database because it has relationships and dependencies, which
allow us to do accurate Change Management. So it’s impact analysis. It’s
about giving the business the service it wants when it’s wanted.”
“A significant
The team has regular meetings with service departments to review problems. “We’ve
focused on areas where there are a lot of repeat calls,” Edwards said. “We’ve feature of
been able to cherry-pick areas and get quick wins, freeing up the service
departments to do more technical things.”
assyst is that
people actively
Problem Management was ramped up with the appointment of June Pedley
as Problem Manager. “assyst is easy to use and can link calls which is want to use it -
even some
particularly useful for major incidents,” she said.
“When something goes wrong, everyone’s rightly preoccupied with departments
restoration of service but we need to get to the root cause of the
problem,” Edwards added. “Having a Problem Manager also helps when you outside IS.”
have a major incident because the problem is managed formally.”
There are positive aspects to major incidents too: Post-Incident Reviews
cover what staff did well in addition to what could have been done better. Nick Edwards, Service Manager
The Service Management team believes assyst has proved popular inside
Royal Liver because staff have been able to see the benefits for themselves.
For instance, they were able to give the right information to the section
responsible for insuring the assurance giant’s own IT equipment. “We
populated assyst with the insurance replacement costs,” Petrie
Royal Liver Assurance
said. “The data is accurate and we are correctly insured.”
Edwards added “A significant feature of assyst is that people actively want to use it - even some
departments outside IS. Previous support tools were difficult to use and didn’t really provide the
information people wanted.”
Royal Liver also deploys Axios’ assystNET on its Intranet. Departments such as Human Resources and
Treasury are successfully using this for scheduling reports including General Ledger. In addition
Customer Relationship Managers use it to track incidents. End-users do not need in-depth training on
assystNET.
The team is particularly enthusiastic about the introduction of Change Management, which will
automate processes currently handled manually. When a new member of staff joins the company, for
example, tasks are automatically set up to allocate IT equipment, a telephone, email account and
security access.
“Previously it was a huge laborious process,” Petrie said. “Change Management will give us even more
benefits. It should be brilliant.”
Are there conflicts between serving the Information Technology department and the overall business?
“It’s effective for everyone because often the nature of technical guys is that they don’t want to
talk to the business and vice-versa,” said Edwards. “We act as translators, turning ‘techno-babble’
into plain English and the other way round. That’s one of the reasons the department has been so
successful.”
“We also understand business urgency,” Petrie interjected. “Technical people don’t always
appreciate that. Anything affecting customer service is critical. As soon as we get a call from the
customer service centre we respond.”
Reports generated from assyst provide useful management reports on a variety of issues ranging from
how IS is managing its own workflows through to statistics which can be used when re-negotiating
hardware maintenance contracts.
“We have very good in-house reporting capabilities with Crystal but assyst gives us everything we’ve
ever wanted,” Edwards said. “There’s a huge amount of information in there. The data repository has
never let us down.”
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