Wednesday Night Pizza

Transformational IT projects, with spirited kick-off parties, awkward executive speeches and quirky gifts for the project team (T-shirts saying "I Survived Focus") are infamous for a precipitous drop in enthusiasm shortly after launch. Both Rosholt and Keller have seen their fair share of good and bad projects. "We've seen it all," Rosholt says.

Keller's experience not only taught him about the need for high-level sponsorship but also the necessity for creating a forum for ongoing discussions. This was especially critical for Focus because, by nature, MDM transformations require continuous debate and dialogue regarding changes to how employees describe, manipulate and share the very data that defines their jobs. Thus was born Wednesday Night Pizza, a weekly gathering of the executive steering committee members (CFOs, finance controllers, and IT leaders and project managers). The meetings started at 5pm and occasionally ran until 10pm. "Rarely did it last less than two or three hours," Rosholt says. "We would bang through all the issues that changed every day." Team members sat face to face, over pizza, and worked through key change management and data governance challenges, always sticking to the 80/20 rule and always with a silent nod to the immutable 24-month deadline.

The fact that Rosholt was a regular attendee was not lost on anyone. "Having the clarity of what outcomes you need and having [Rosholt's] decision making weekly was absolutely critical," Keller says. Or as Gopal puts it, "We needed that hammer to remove some of the bottlenecks."

Looking back, Rosholt says the cost of the pizza was a cheap price for what the group accomplished every Wednesday. "There were so many lessons learned on the issues around change management and communication and how you line people up to do their jobs," he says.

On those front lines, the work was gruelling. "There were some days we wondered if there would be a light at the end of the tunnel, and were we ever going to get through this?" recalls Butler. "We had two years. The clock was ticking."

Keller was acutely aware of the demands on his IT group. "Were there any times when people were working weekends and holidays and the schedule got questioned? Yes," he says. In fact, according to Keller, the 280 or so members of the IT team eventually would put in 1.2 million hours, including overtime, on the project.

But by late 2005, there was light at the end of the tunnel. The team could see the new business processes and financial data governance mechanisms actually being used by Nationwide employees. And it all was working. "They saw the value they were creating," recalls Butler. "The 'aha' moment came when we finally got a chance to look in the rear-view mirror."

At Last, the ROI

That happy "aha" moment didn't last long. More than a year after the final wave of Focus was rolled out to the last business unit, the team is still working to finish that remaining 20 percent of functionality, those requests that were set aside during the initial push and watching as data volume on the system reached more than 150 million financial transactions per month.

"Do [the executives] have things they would have loved for us to go after, to get to the next level of evolution? I think so," says Gopal. Improvements to the system, including enhancements to depth at which executives can dig into the financial data, are ongoing, Gopal notes. "We've come a hundred miles, and we have another hundred to go."

Nationwide execs concede that the system is still evolving but say substantial gains are everywhere. The first benefit of the transformation that Rosholt mentions is something that didn't happen. "You go through a project such as this, in a period of extreme regulatory and accounting oversight, and these things can cough up more issues, such as earnings restatements. We've avoided that," he says. "That doesn't mean we're perfect, but that's one thing everyone's amazed at. We went through all this change and nothing coughed up. Our balance sheet was right." Therefore, Nationwide has one less thing to worry about, one more thing to be confident about.

Next, Rosholt notes that users of the Focus system are experimenting with its new features. For example, Nationwide's Scottsdale Insurance business unit will soon be able to identify and analyze its most profitable customers. "All of this used to be in an Excel spreadsheet that they always had to reconcile into the financials," Rosholt says. "Now we can understand what value proposition we bring our customers and what value proposition our customers bring us. This is a big change for our industry. "Nationwide now also has the flexibility to change the regional structures in how it designates its core lines of businesses. For example, Rosholt says that when executives decide to install a new geographic-based reporting structure in the property and casualty insurance operations, moving a business line from one state or region (Midwest) to another (Northeast), the process "would have taken nine months", he says. Now it takes just a couple of days. The end result is that execs and business-unit managers can now g et a clearer and more accurate picture of how Nationwide's state and regional lines are doing - and get it much faster.

Last, but certainly not least, Rosholt can now give Jurgensen a more immediate, accurate and comprehensive picture of Nationwide's financial health.

It took nearly 30 days to close Nationwide's books for 2006. With the new system in place, the amount of time necessary has declined significantly: 19 days to close Q1 2007; 16 days for Q2; 15 days for Q3. The target is to get that down below 10 days by 2010.

As for the goal to grow Nationwide's net income, the company recorded $US1.1 billion in 2005 and topped that with $US2.1 billion in 2006. For those on the Focus team, that's the kind of financial news that is always a pleasure to deliver to senior executives.

"It's nice," says Butler, "when they can see their financials in a timely manner."