Journey to accelerate change
Project highlights:
- Enables a great customer experience
- Removes barriers to other projects
- Empowers the person who wants to solve the issue
- Removes the need for heavy duty coding and data transformations, which costs millions and takes years
- Joins together legacy systems in an overall business process, allowing creation of APIs for flexible, fluid customer interfaces
- Adds value to IT’s reputation
Full power innovation
Accelerating innovation is hard at the best of times. When you are responsible for managing a nation’s travel infrastructure, safety, efficiency and reliability are paramount. And that can obstruct innovation.
The Enterprise Architects in the Chief Innovation Technology Office are responsible for digital change throughout this large organisation. They help customers complete 4.7 million journeys every day and operate the UK’s busiest ground transportation terminals.
They share their experience of accelerating change using Netcall’s low-code solution, Liberty Create.
What is great customer experience?
“Customer” is a broad concept. It includes direct customers, freight operators, plus indirect customers, such as passengers and neighbours living nearby.
For the IT Team, staff members are their customers. This is also varied: some staff members work in dangerous environments, others are corporate users who need to run office systems effectively. IT focuses on how they provide services more effectively to all frontline staff. So, what is great customer service for staff?
Areas of focus to deliver against for their customers:
- Safety – Every process must enhance the safe operations.
- Reliability – Preventing and responding to disruption.
- Growth – Capacity is a great challenge, expansion is tackled with tech.
- Efficiency – Driving down operating and maintenance costs.
Business change priorities
Three key business change priorities which resonate with most organisations:
- Scalability of people and skills – third parties are not always the answer due to cost and reliability.
- Business demand – the pipeline won’t allow IT to get through the workload.
- Legacy IT – poor experience versus the cost of updating or replacing.
Any innovation must apply to those business goals and work across any part of the business.
Low-code for utilities
A low-code approach fits neatly with these priorities. The Solution Architects were keen to use it but needed to prove that it could actually deliver and that the technology could stand up in such a safety critical and risk averse organisation.
It was vital to demonstrate genuine business value and show that this could be rolled out to other areas. This is where Netcall came in and explained their low-code product, Create. Low-code is the easiest way to develop business applications, fast.
Test Case # 1 Managed Terminals
A particular transport terminal had a challenge which was causing genuine inconvenience. The process of booking maintenance engineers was so arduous that their customer-facing team were being prevented from spending as much time as they would ideally on front-line activities which help passengers.
As a safety critical environment, all official visitors must be correctly booked. However, before a contractor could get onsite, it took four full-time staff up to six weeks to manage the process which involved a 40-page document being emailed between all the parties. If the fault was crucial safety equipment, like a security barrier, an additional security guard was also needed. This meant extra costs were incurred and also retailers in the terminal suffered from a reduced income.
Inefficiencies were causing lost income.
The Enterprise Architects showed us their process and asked us to build a prototype to show what Create can do. After two weeks of work, we went back to demonstrate and found that we were 80% of the way towards solving the issue. More than just a presentation, something tangible that was working. They found that a unique experience in the IT industry.
“We said to Netcall, ‘Here’s our process. Build a prototype and show us what you can do. You’ve got two weeks.’ And they did!”
— Enterprise Architect
Test Case # 2 Replacing a legacy system
Next, they needed to replace a legacy system which had been built ten years ago, by a retiring employee. IT had searched for a viable replacement, but found nothing which made economic sense. It was a very niche application.
Netcall Professional Services created something to replace the system and trained the team. They now run, manage and maintain it themselves.
“ It is amazing, it’s so agile. Within weeks you have something tangible. You can test, use and iterate in real time. It has now come out of IT and sits with the business partners. They are happy with this, rather than pushing back to IT every time they need a change. Using Create was a massive step change. It was an opportunity to empower our business partners to become the ‘change agents’. It was spot on.”
— Enterprise Architect
Using low-code moving forward
In a company which is all about efficiency, low-code enables faster improvements and therefore drives down operational costs. This allows staff to be more time-efficient. The Solution Architects wanted to take Create forward to their business partners as a significant statement, empowering ownership by different teams to drive their own projects forward.
Create offered an opportunity to empower business partners to own, maintain and drive forward their specific solutions. In roughly four months, five or six big business problems had been automated. These were being driven forward by the business users affected. Rather than becoming a problem for IT to solve, they can now solve the issue themselves. Fast.
Learn more about Liberty Create.
