IT-centric model no longer viable for Admiral

Launched in 1993, Admiral Group’s principal business is the sale of private motor insurance direct to the UK public via four brands: Admiral, Elephant, Diamond and Bell. It also owns Confused.com, the UK’s first price comparison website, Gladiator, a van insurance broker, and in December 2012, Admiral entered the home insurance market. Outside the UK, Admiral operates car insurance businesses in Spain, Italy, France and the USA, in addition to price comparison businesses in Spain, France and the USA. At present Admiral insures 3.7 million vehicles in five countries and employs over 7,000 people in seven countries.

The challenge
In a world of ubiquitous computing—home PCs and laptops, smartphones, tablet computers and an increasing number of other connected devices—the old model of corporate IT is increasingly out of touch with users’ needs and preferences. Employees now expect to be able to choose the devices and applications that best suit their needs, and do not want to meet with resistance from the IT function.

For Harvey Sandhu, Infrastructure Manager at Admiral, this realisation was the start-point for a new way of thinking about service provision and support: “We were aware that our existing, IT-centric model was no longer viable: people simply don’t want IT to do everything for them, and they expect to have greater flexibility in how they work. At the same time, we knew that the proliferation of devices and operating systems in our organisation was creating additional difficulties in demonstrating regulatory compliance.”

The challenges for the IT function at Admiral were to ensure that it could keep systems patched and protected, and to maintain support for a growing number of users and devices. The existing patchwork of heterogeneous management solutions was a barrier to gaining a more holistic IT management capability.

End-to-end control and flexibility
After an intensive head-to-head comparison against another leading tool, Admiral opted to deploy LANDESK Management Suite to act as the central point of control for its end-user computing landscape.

“Although we were extremely happy with our LANDESK Service Desk environment, which we had deployed two years previously, it was not a foregone conclusion that we would choose LANDESK Management Suite,” recalls Harvey Sandhu. “In the end, the tight integration between the two products and the flexible licensing on offer from LANDESK made the difference.”

As Admiral continues its rollout, it is replacing a disparate set of support and administration applications with the integrated, ITIL-compliant solutions within LANDESK Management Suite. “In the past, there was dissatisfaction around the need to master ‘yet another tool’, and our operations staff often needed to undertake significant extra work to bridge the gap between different systems,” says Harvey Sandhu. “With the LANDESK solutions, all functions work consistently and in a highly integrated way, so IT operations can run much more smoothly and intuitively. As we adopt more of the functionality, we are building an end-to-end environment for IT management that gives us great flexibility in terms of the devices and operating systems we can support.”

Ready for change
Within the first year of deploying LANDESK Management Suite, Admiral has undergone significant and far-reaching change: moving offices, consolidating data centres and implementing a completely new business application for thousands of users. Although the size of the IT team has remained constant, Admiral has been able to execute these major change projects while improving support for the end-user computing landscape.

“The LANDESK solutions have played a key role in enabling us to do much more with the same resources,” says Harvey Sandhu. “Throughout these major changes we have kept the desktop estate patched and have improved our performance against SLAs. With integrated remote-control fixes from within LANDESK Service Desk, we have also reduced the number of desktop visits we need to perform from a second-line perspective.”

The ability to define custom processes in LANDESK Service Desk enabled Admiral to make it the main interface for the development team working on the new business application. “Using Service Desk, we can highlight key areas where repeated incidents are coming up,” says Harvey Sandhu. “Once we transition to a live state, all the building blocks for supporting the system will already be in place within the LANDESK solution.”

He adds, “LANDESK Service Desk gives us a very full-featured process flow that can be used to automatically drive multiple custom actions and workflows, saving considerable time and effort. And unlike the other vendors’ offerings we considered, the self-service portal is fully integrated, so we didn’t need to make additional investments.”

Enhanced consistency and visibility
Using LANDESK Service Desk, Admiral promotes a more consistent level of information capture, so that teams higher up in the resolution chain are much more likely to be able to resolve issues without needing to go back for missing details. Equally, by linking child and parent incidents, the company has gained a much better indication of the severity and pervasiveness of issues.

“Rather than simply reacting to the most vocal requests for support, this means we can prioritise remediation based on real metrics around the impact of each issue,” comments Harvey Sandhu. “Today, thanks to our LANDESK solutions, we have much greater visibility of incidents and issues, and a clearer picture of the remediation actions that we need to take.”