Insurance company IAG is declining comment on the likely IT consequences of its prospective merger.
IAG, or Insurance Australia Group, is planning to bring NRMA (trading as State Insurance) and NZI under one umbrella.
Strategy and technology general manager Catherine Rusby (pictured) said last week that she could make no comment “simply because the sale is not finalised”.
“Meanwhile, it is absolutely business as usual. We haven’t even formed an integration team yet.”
NRMA has been engaged in a business process re-engineering exercise known as Project Endeavour, which Rusby enthusiastically presented to a recent event run by CIO magazine.
Project Endeavour was to involve dumping NRMA’s legacy IT platform for a Microsoft-based system, which, Rusby emphasised, had to have been developed “this century”.
Project Endeavour also involved scrapping a regional structure and replacing it with a centralised one (shrinking staff numbers by 20%), and culling the number of products the company sells from about 300 to fewer than 20.
NRMA is also scheduled to transfer its 14 IT staff to Gen-i as part of an outsourcing deal.
Senior management at Gen-i could not be contacted by press time.
Gen-i marketing communications manager Clare Farrant assured Computerworld that the IAG move is “just a name change” as far as Gen-i is concerned. “It does not change our situation or our contract with [the former NRMA],” she says.
NRMA did a five-year, $40 million outsourcing deal with Gen-i in September. NRMA has 1250 desktops in a Citrix thin-client environment.
No one from NZI could be contacted by deadline.