Gigabit Magazine – August 2019

“ A lot of people have just

done Lean, a lot of people

have just done Agile, but I

think by bringing these

four strategies together

we’ve done something

really unique”

—

Guru Vasudeva,

Vice President and Chief Information

Officer (CIO) of Program and Application

Services, Nationwide

30% of software development at

Nationwide. Speaking to Gigabit, Guru

Vasudeva, Vice President and Chief

Information Officer (CIO) of

Program and Application Services at

Nationwide said: “We conducted a

Gartner benchmark that showed that

our Agile development line was better

than the industry standard in terms of

productivity, however, overall Nation-

wide was still 7.8% worse in unit cost

compared to the industry. We estimat-

ed that we could get close to 12%

savings by adopting these practices

across all our software development –

that's around US$60mn annually.” With

this in mind, Nationwide decided to

scale these methods enterprise-wide

and now, the firm has around 200 soft-

ware development lines, almost all of

which have adopted this blend of Agile

and Lean. Zeroing in on quality, pro-

ductivity and time to market, Nationwide

has also streamlined its benchmark

metrics, and today it can trace around

US$60mn of savings on an annual

basis. In its most recent benchmark in

2017, for instance, Nationwide reported

60

AI

AUGUST 2019