You Say Tomato; I Say Tomahto

After interviewing the key stakeholders and identifying the core functionalities - business planning, capital optimization, risk management, analysis and interpretation, record and reporting, organizational management, stakeholder management and accounting policy management - the next thing the team did was create a data governance system. The system instituted repeatable processes and specific rules for compiling, analyzing and reporting the financial data on both a business-unit level and an enterprise level. The process would take place on a daily basis and would touch all of the back-end systems (for example, the PeopleSoft ERP system) and the front-end (Hyperion and Microsoft financial applications). "Pre-Focus, there was no data governance," Butler says. "We had to put in some policies, rules and procedures [for managing the data] at the top of the house, which at times has had a contentious relationship with the business units." In other words, business units had run independently for so long, with the ir own definitions and own bookkeeping methods, they couldn't see the value in common data sets.

Nationwide formed a data governance group whose members, from finance and IT, would be the "keepers of the book of record", the rules of the MDM system, Gopal notes. The group's charge was to figure out how each business unit's financial data definitions would transform into data sets that could be standardized and imported into the MDM financial system. But first, because there were hundreds of sources and classifications of data, it was critical that the various business-unit stakeholders on the data governance team agree on definitions. If there are two different ways to classify one data set - for example, if one unit calls a Nationwide product "Standard Auto" and another calls the same product "Std Auto", or similar differences in defining "purchase order", "invoice" or "customer" - then the system is worthless. "You simply cannot have both," Gopal says.

Another, more complex example is how business units defined geographic information. Gopal says that different applications had geography rolled up differently (for example, Eastern/Western or Northeast/Midwest). But in various applications, Illinois could have been in the Western region and in others it could have been in the Midwestern region. "Aggregating data from various sources, taking in the 'rolled up' level, made [achieving] an enterprise [view] very difficult," Gopal says. Even with a mature data governance program, he notes, the classification and reclassification process is "never ending" because there are always "people coming back with creative ideas on how you can improve the workflow [of the MDM system] to work better with the applications".

Tool Time

It was only after the requirements, definitions and parameters were mapped out that Gopal's group began looking at technologies. Gopal had two rules to guide them: First, all financial-related systems had to be subscribers to the central book of record. Second, none of the master data in any of the financial applications could ever be out of sync. So the Focus team's final step was to evaluate technologies that would follow and enforce those rules.

The team reasoned that it had neither the time nor the inclination to invent MDM technology at Nationwide. "We wanted to start off on the right footing from a TCO perspective; with only 24 months you don't have a ton of time to build a lot of stuff," Gopal says. His team sought out best-of-breed MDM toolsets that would be able to tie into their existing systems. (See "Nationwide's MDM Toolbox" at end of story, for a brief description of the technologies that make Focus work.) Gopal wasn't overly "worried about [technology] execution" because he had assembled this type of system before and knew that the technology solutions on the market, even in the most vanilla forms, were robust enough for Nationwide's needs.

What did worry him was Nationwide's legion of financial employees who didn't relish the idea of changing the way they went about their work.

The Culture Wars

Though Jurgensen, Rosholt and Keller weren't involved in the day-to-day minutiae that accompanies a massive project such as Focus, it was never far from their minds. The Focus team needed their support at almost every turn. A transformation unlike anything the 36,000 Nationwide Insurance employees had ever seen was at hand. Rosholt knew he had to make one of the most important sales of his career. "You have to sell the vision, and the benefits," he says. The most difficult part was getting everyone to take their medicine because it was good for the enterprise. "In some businesses, it wasn't a 'win-win'," Rosholt says. "In the smaller, more compact businesses, they'd say: 'I've got a very simple system and we've been working on this for 15 years. Why are you disrupting my life?'" And to a degree, Rosholt felt their pain. "You really couldn't make a strong argument that the way they live today is going to be dramatically better, because a lot of it was about the enterprise," he says.

At the beginning of the program, Nationwide formed a "One Finance Family" program that tried to unify all the finance folks around Focus. Executives were also able to identify those employees who were most affected through weekly "change meetings" and provide support. In addition, executives placed dedicated communications personnel who were responsible for communicating and managing change through the meetings and media channels.

The Focus team had to remain resolute. The overarching theme, that there would be no compromise in data quality and integrity, was repeated early and often, and execs made sure that the gravity of the change was communicated before anyone saw any new software.

Finally, in March 2005, with three waves of planned deployments ahead of it, the team started rolling out the new Focus system.

One of the first businesses to make the transition was one of CIO Keller's divisions, Nationwide Shared Services, which handles document services and sourcing, among other functions. (His IT division also was an early adopter.)

"We were a guinea pig," he recalls. "We had pretty good [financial] systems and were able to do what we needed to do, pre-Focus. We wanted parity to do what we did before. It's a harder sell to people who weren't getting the business benefits." But it was clear that Focus was the better - and only - way.