ALLIED IRISH BANK
“ It ’ s all about the customer experience and it ’ s all about building that capability so we can quickly react to our customers ”
– Graham Fagan , Head of IT Partner Management
excellent people in Ireland , there are huge demands pulling upon this talent ,” Thomas says . “ For example , Google probably has up to about 6,000 people now so they , like others , are attracting a lot of technology resources out of the market , with their strong social media brands . The shortage of resources is making it difficult for businesses to recruit technology talent in the local market .
“ We decided that we needed to work with partners that could bring that talent to us in our market and that ’ s how the partnership ecosystem came about . But here lies one of the critical things in that part of the ecosystem , the fact that they had , or were willing to invest and establish delivery centres in Ireland to complement their global delivery capabilities . That was crucial .”
Partner power
It was soon clear that to become more agile , reduce risk and align with changing patterns of consumer behaviour , AIB had to depart from a traditional in-house delivery model . The first important partnership was actually formed before Thomas joined as CPO . HCL helped to overhaul legacy infrastructure and installed a new virtual desktop , compatible with mobile and tablets across the whole organisation , from head office to bank branches . “ This provided some early learnings for us around the outsourcing world and allowed us to think about the longer term strategy ,” comments Graham Fagan , Head of IT Partner Management .
With the HCL partnership successfully deployed , AIB set about establishing a partner eco-system to support the
40 October 2016