AA embarks on drive to transform business

Company's £50m project held up by problems separating desktop systems

The AA has successfully separated its IT from former parent Centrica and started work on transforming its business, a year after signing a £50m outsourcing deal with IBM (Computing, 24 February 2005).

But the breakdown and insurance company has admitted that it and IBM underestimated the scale of the task, and that some delays have occurred.

Karen Gillespie, head of service delivery at the AA, says the most challenging part of the project to date was the difficulty of separating desktop systems intertwined with those of Centrica.

‘Separating from Centrica in that short period and having all the new services put in meant there were some teething problems,’ she said.

‘We had quite a high fault rate on our new Windows XP desktops; we had a backlog on the service desk which led to some poor internal customer perception.

‘We had to put some effort into stabilising the service, which meant that we delayed some of the transformation we had planned as part of the contract.’

The AA signed a seven-year agreement with IBM when it was sold to private equity firms CVC and Permira in a £1.75bn deal.

The company migrated 24 million customer records from Centrica’s systems last year (Computing, 13 October) and has now started work on the transformation stage.

The AA will install a standard desktop across the organisation based on the IBM toolset, and consolidate servers so they are based on IBM standards.

Gillespie says despite the desktop problems the AA is pleased with the progress IBM has made, but has learned some lessons.

‘If we could do this again, we would involve more permanent staff at the early stages,’ she said.

‘Because the AA separated from Centrica, we didn’t have a lot of permanent employees involved in the contract period.’