Microsoft Windows
/ / Allstate Canada Upgrades Its Desktop for a More Stable and Secure IT Environment
Overview
Country or Region: Canada
Industry: Insurance
Customer Profile
Allstate Insurance has provided Canadians with home, auto, and personal insurance for 50 years, with more than 800,000 Canadian policies. This “Good Hands Network” has 250 offices throughout Canada and approximately 1,500 employees.
Business Situation
In 2002, the company realized it needed to update its aging desktop to improve stability, performance, and security. Also, the company’s IT department was struggling with routine software updates and installations.
Solution
Allstate Canada chose Microsoft® Windows® XP and Microsoft Office XP to upgrade its aging IT infrastructure and to address performance as well as security issues with existing applications.
Benefits
§ Improved desktop performance and reduced down time
§ More secure environment
§ Improved integration with legacy applications
§ Prospective client tracking / “We did an extensive amount of planning and testing before migrating over to Windows XP and Office XP to ensure we got exactly what we needed.”
Juha Tuominen, Technical Services Manager, Allstate Canada
For the past 50 years, the Allstate Insurance Company of Canada has provided Canadians with home, auto, and personal insurance. In late 2002, Allstate Canada decided to upgrade its aging IT infrastructure to assist its large and geographically dispersed workforce. With a goal of improving software performance, stability, and network security, Allstate Canada chose to introduce Microsoft® Windows® XP and Microsoft Office XP to its organization. The implementation helped Allstate Canada meet its IT goals of delivering a stable and highly functional operating platform to the company and enabling employees to improve productivity while working with familiar software tools.
Situation
The Allstate Insurance Company of Canada and its affiliated companies have been providing Canadians with home, auto, and personal insurance for 50 years. Its customers have more than 800,000 Canadian policies. To ensure that its customers can easily reach an Allstate Canada representative at any time, the company supplies its 450 agents with full-service Internet access at Allstate.ca and call centre support at 1-800-ALLSTATE. This “Good Hands Network” has 250 offices dispersed throughout Canada, staffed by approximately 1,500 employees.
The large and highly distributed workforce combined with the complex corporate structure of Allstate Canada have resulted in a support-heavy heterogeneous IT environment, which includes both legacy and home-grown applications. In November 2002, the company’s management realized that updating its aging desktop based on the Microsoft® Windows® 95 operating system and Microsoft Office 95 could bring stability and performance improvements to the enterprise, as well as address some pressing security concerns. Data security is a critical issue for Allstate Canada as employees store sensitive business data on their PCs. Physical security is also an issue with significant technology residing at multiple locations.
With Allstate Canada offices spread throughout the country, the company’s IT department was also struggling with routine software updates and installations. IT staff either had to travel to the branch offices, costing money and disrupting work flow, or mail CDs and ask end users to upgrade systems themselves. End-user installations took the control of system management out of the hands of the central IT department as individual users could alter desktop configurations themselves, sometimes turning off security features or installing personal software onto their PCs.
“Getting a secure system was very important to us since it’s the proprietary information we process that drives our business,” says Colin Wong, Director of Information Technology Technical Services for Allstate Canada. “We also want to give our employees access to technology that works when they need it, how they need it.”
Solution
Allstate Canada began working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Buchanan Associates in the fall of 2002 on a full analysis of its business needs and technology requirements so it could begin planning for the desktop upgrade. Buchanan Associates uses its employees’ expertise in information-systems design and implementation and in management best practices to help companies improve business processes and gain competitive leadership through the right application of information-systems technology.
“Initially, we were planning an upgrade to Windows 2000 Professional and Office 2000, but with the significant advancements, we decided to go directly to Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Office XP Professional,” says Juha Tuominen, Technical Services Manager for Allstate Canada.
Buchanan also provided Allstate Canada with the technical and project management expertise to develop a customized desktop solution and assisted Allstate Canada during the testing and deployment phases, enabling the organization to maximize its investment in Microsoft software technology.
“We did an extensive amount of planning and testing before migrating over to Windows XP and Office XP to ensure we got exactly what we needed,” says Tuominen. “We felt comfortable with how secure and stable the products are and didn’t give serious consideration to other products. With the amount of control over our network we got from Windows XP, the decision was relatively easy to make.”
As data security was a key concern for Allstate Canada, the security features of Windows XP and Office XP proved a powerful tool for helping to protect business information. With Windows XP, the organization can manage users on the network by providing predetermined configurations of security-related policies, which allows IT departments to ensure the appropriate level of security on every workstation. Remote delivery of software also means the central IT department can quickly and easily take care of any required system upgrades.
Benefits
In May 2003, rollout of Windows XP Professional and Office XP Professional began across the Allstate Canada organization. In addition to realizing its goals of increased control, security, and system stability, IT staff also began to hear reports of improved application performance and compatibility, as well as enhanced productivity.
Smooth Deployment and Seamless Transition
Implementation went smoothly for Allstate Canada, thanks to the installation features in Windows XP. For example, with Windows XP System Preparation Tool (or SysPrep), Allstate Canada administrators were able to clone computer configurations, systems, and applications and decrease the number of desktop images to load and maintain.
“Implementation went really well for us,” Wong says. “We worked hard to develop the perfect, standardized image on which we could then create a ghost role from our PC. That has allowed us to standardize across the board. Having one image to deal with made deployment that much easier and makes maintenance less time consuming as well.”
The software distribution and installation features of Windows XP also help Allstate Canada IT staff centrally manage application installation, updating, and removal more easily. “We can install new software now without shutting down, and that has been a big hit with our users too as it means less interference in their work,” Wong says.
The intuitive user interface and Help features of Windows XP and Office XP added to the seamless transition of Allstate Canada employees to the new software. With common tasks consolidated and simplified and with new visual cues, users have been able to navigate their computers more easily with minimal training.
“Originally, we thought that the Windows 95 look-alike desktop mode option might make the transition easier for our users, but in the end we actually stayed with the Windows XP mode,” Tuominen says. “That really shows the intuitive nature of the Windows XP interface. Users were able to pick it up really quickly.”
Greater Security and Increased Stability
Allstate Canada processes a lot of financial information every day, making security of data a high priority for the organization. Windows XP improved the safeguarding of information on a number of levels, thanks to features like its Encrypting File System (EFS), which encrypts each file with a randomly generated key. EFS can provide multiple users access to an encrypted document, while helping provide protection from hackers and data theft.
Additionally, user-level access controls have given IT staff the ability to set permissions, granting or denying particular users access to specific documents and resources.
However, the biggest benefit was realized by the IT department, which was able to create a locked-down environment using the Group Policy settings in Windows XP Professional. Using a policy such as software restriction, IT staff has centralized management over the applications that reside on desktops and safeguarded the network from downloaded malicious code. The locked-down environment also means that IT staff members don’t have to worry about unlicensed programs finding their way onto Allstate Canada PCs.
“The enhanced security has already made a difference in the stability of our systems and the amount of maintenance work we have to do,” says Wong. “And, if we do need to investigate a problem, it is much easier now that everyone is operating with the same system image. Presently, when we need to troubleshoot something, we know what we’re looking at and don’t have to go deep down to find out what’s wrong. That definitely saves us time in troubleshooting and supporting the system.”
End users have noticed an improvement in the performance of their PCs. One of the first things the IT department heard from Allstate Canada employees was how much time they were saving each morning, thanks to the significant reduction in time their computers were taking to start. The stability of Windows XP has also dramatically reduced the number of system failures throughout the day, allowing for higher productivity and reduced levels of stress among users.
“The new desktop has already reduced the amount of calls we get to IT help desk,” says Wong.
The enhanced recovery tools and system-repair features in Office XP also offer peace of mind, as they greatly reduce data loss in the now-rare event of a program failing to respond. The Document Recovery feature of Office XP can be set up to automatically save an opened document, spreadsheet, or presentation at the time an application stops responding, so users don't lose a moment's work.
Better Integration and New Productivity Tools
Allstate Canada has noted the increased support that Windows XP offers the company’s legacy applications. The company found that older programs which were not performing well on Windows 95 have integrated well with Windows XP. Thanks to the ease of integration, Allstate Canada employees are now able to continue working with applications they are familiar with while gaining the productivity enhancements of the new tools.
Features found in the Office XP Professional suite, such as content-sensitive smart tags and task panes, make it easier to create and format documents. Keeping track of editing changes and adding comments has also made collaboration on documents easier, helping move business along throughout the company.
Time savings are being realized daily by Allstate Canada employees who can now better manage their schedules, thanks to the Calendar and task-reminder tools of the integrated Microsoft Outlook® messaging and collaboration client, also part of Office XP.
Moving Forward
With a customer base of nearly a million Canadians and growing, Allstate Canada staff members rely on technology to do their jobs effectively. Introducing Windows XP and Office XP to the organization has allowed Allstate Canada to deliver its employees tools to be even more productive. And, as business moves at an ever-increasing speed, Allstate Canada is already looking forward to expanding the assortment of tools available to its workers. The IT department is planning to introduce collaboration tools, such as Microsoft NetMeeting® conferencing software, hoping to reduce the time and money spent on travel by the company’s highly dispersed agents.
“Rolling out Windows XP and Office XP has made a big difference in the way our applications perform and integrate,” Wong says. “We’re really looking forward to this system reducing our total cost of IT ownership.”
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