Getting Started on MDM

"Fourteen general ledgers, 12 reporting tools, 17 financial data repositories and 300,000 spreadsheets were used in finance," says Butler. "That's not real conducive to 'one version of the truth'."

Early in his tenure as CEO, Jurgensen's concerns about the company's financials weren't limited to the timeliness of the data; he was also worried about its integrity and accuracy. He and other execs knew that faster access to more comprehensive data sets would allow for better trend analysis and forecasting decisions, and strengthen budgeting, reporting and accounting processes. For example, because Nationwide had such a variety of businesses, the company carried a lot of risk - some easily visible, some not. "So, if equity markets went down, we were exposed," notes Butler. "But we didn't realize that until the markets actually went down. We needed some enterprise view of the world."

One of Nationwide's subsidiaries, Nationwide Financial Services, is a public company and has the requisite regulatory and compliance responsibilities (such as Sarbanes-Oxley), but the rest of Nationwide Insurance is a mutual company owned by its policyholders, and doesn't have those requirements. Rosholt says the entire company will move to Sarbox-like requirements by 2010, and the Focus project provided a kick-start to unifying the rest of the company's financials to accommodate more stringent accounting practices.

Executives also knew that common data definitions among all the business units would provide comparable financial data for analysis (which was difficult, if not impossible, without those definitions). "We needed consistent data across the organization," Rosholt says. "We were looking for one book of record."

The Focus project team began envisioning the scope and plan in January 2004. Rosholt handed off day-to-day responsibilities on the finance side to Butler, his "change champion", who had worked in corporate headquarters and in a business unit. "I had the dual perspective and see both the needs of the businesses versus the needs of the enterprise," she says. "I could play devil's advocate with myself."

CFO Rosholt went back to his Bank One roots and recruited Vikas Gopal, who had proven his mettle on similar projects, to lead the IT team. All together, Butler and Gopal would have 280 project management, finance and IT folks working on the transformation.

Vast Project, Defined Rules

Rosholt was the business sponsor (with Jurgensen providing high-level support), and he laid down several rules at the start. The first was that he was not going to budge on the 24-month schedule. "When you take longer, you don't get that much more done; you just burn people out, spend more money, and it's more frustrating," Rosholt says. "So you set stretch goals and go after it."

With no wiggle room on the time line, the team, with Rosholt's encouragement, followed what it refers to as the "80/20" rule. It knew that it wasn't going to get 100 percent of the desired functionality of the new MDM system, so the team decided that if it could get roughly 80 percent of the project up and running in 24 months, it could fix the remaining 20 percent later. "If we went after perfection," says Rosholt, "we'd still be at it."

Keeping in mind that no one would get everything he wanted, the Focus team interviewed key stakeholders in Nationwide's business units to understand where their pain points were. "We went back to basics," says Gopal. "We said: 'Let's talk about your financial systems, how they help your decision making'." The team then determined where senior management wanted to focus and presented it with a choice of 10 different financial competencies. "Do we want to be the best company that does transaction recording? Or enterprise risk? Or analytics?" Gopal says.

In other words, people were introduced to the concept of making trade-offs, which allowed the Focus team to target the system's core functionalities and keep control over the project's scope.