NBN Co hits savings milestone in IT simplification

NBN Co says it has hit two milestones in a multi-year “simplicity” program targeting IT and systems, including banking 40 percent of targeted cost savings.

The Enterprise Simplicity program has its roots in 2020, though details - including the name and its key pillars - have only really been published in the past year.

The company’s latest corporate plan [pdf], released last week, offers an expanded view of the works in each of the six pillars where NBN Co is targeting simplification works.

The plan also offers a brief view of progress, noting that the company is now “almost three years into [what is] a five-year program” that has “so far delivered 40 percent of planned cost savings and over 60 percent of planned systems decommissioning.”

NBN Co said it hoped to emerge from the program a “leaner, faster and more efficient wholesaler”, and as a company able “to innovate” and bring products to market more quickly.

On the IT side, NBN Co said one of the pillars is data-focused, and involves "consolidating multiple data lakes, data warehouses and analytics platforms”.

It has recently revealed efforts to create a “data-as-an-asset culture” internally, which indicates that consolidation of data, data services and associated capability, is to some extent underway.

The company hopes to establish a “single source of truth” that, among other things, can power “automated business processes and real-time decision-making.”

A spokesperson said it has a data platform in place - it declined to name the vendor - "with the plan to bring together 20 different [data] environments into one."

A separate infrastructure-related pillar has NBN Co consolidating “multiple data centre and cloud environments into a highly resilient and secure environment”.

It also wants to make “multi-factor authentication quicker, easier and more secure for everyone”, which could suggest single sign-on works for accessing the company’s remaining corporate app estate.

Other pillars will see it bring ticketing systems together onto a common SaaS platform; and also moving to a “next-gen SaaS” system for its finance and reporting systems, including those used for billing.

NBN Co's spokesperson did not respond to other questions seeking specifics of the program.