Suncorp chides tech vendor for Agile blindspot

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 19 October 2011 14:10

Business IT - Technology

Financial services business Suncorp has rolled out a $1.5 million information capture system which it hopes will pay for itself by 2013 thanks to time and labour savings. While the installation was relatively speedy, Suncorp hadn't banked on having to educate the technology supplier, Kofax, about the Agile process which is widely deployed in the financial institution.

Dawn Stephenson, executive manager for enterprise applications at Suncorp, said that it turned out Kofax - a $US240+ million business with over 1,000 people - had no experience with Agile. 'We had to walk them through the Agile process,' she said.

Agile is a decade old approach to systems development and involves IT and business people working closely together on system iterations and rollouts. It's an alternative to the traditional waterfall approach of systems design.

In Australia Suncorp has been the poster child for the approach since it began rolling out the Agile approach in 2007.

While Ms Stephenson seems happy with the final result she said that; 'With hindsight we would have envisaged that Kofax would have understood Agile earlier.' But she acknowledged that the Agile-awareness of the three companies considered for the role - Kofax, EMC Captiva and IBM's Datacap - wasn't tested when Suncorp was deciding which information capture platform to select in late 2010.

Despite the dearth of Agile capability in Kofax, Suncorp went live with the system in July - only two months after being selected. Suncorp is now mid-way through a pilot in its loans processing area which takes information sourced via Kofax and feeds that into IBM's FileNet content management system and the division's work flow.

As part of the pilot Suncorp will measure how much faster the loan process can be completed thanks to the information streamlining. Suncorp hopes to go live with the system in about six weeks.