3 lessons to guide NDA IT service delivery in the coming decade
In the new IT world, intelligent customers need intelligent partners ready to go the extra mile.
ICT landscapes today are more demanding to manage than ever before. Old ICT product lifecycles have disappeared. Services can flex up and down on the fly. AI is revolutionising how people work. Within Civil Nuclear decommissioning, there are major challenges to optimise a large and complex IT estate while effectively and efficiently harnessing new technologies, processes and partnerships to better enable the mission.
Rise of the intelligent customer
In this context, as a major ICT service provider to the NDA Group since 2010, Atos has seen first-hand how ICT service management has transformed. In recent years, we’ve participated in the strategic shift away from old IT outsourcing to modern disaggregated environments at both Sellafield and NWS.
We understand the rise of the intelligent customer as a means to give customers more control across the board. In turn, this has driven our own evolution as a partner ready to run alongside and support our customers through the provision of high-availability, value-for-money ICT.
Challenges for every intelligent customer
At the same time – working with NDA and in other large and complex multi-supplier environments – we see emerging challenges faced by every intelligent customer today.
Acting strategically and operationally as an intelligent customer brings a significantly expanded role. It’s no longer about buying evolving IT services from vendors measured against SLAs. It’s about setting direction and making more and bigger decisions about IT strategy within a broader industry and technology environment.
In the case of NDA, IT must contribute to strategic objectives to reduce risk, improve safety and accelerate milestones while optimising total cost of operating. There is the need to keep pace with advances such as IT/OT convergence, address the challenges of technology and application obsolescence, and maintain tight security against evolving threats – all while navigating funding constraints.
The stakes are high: for the industry, the taxpayer, and the environment. Meeting these challenges together over the next decade will shape a critical timeline spanning more than a century.
Three lessons for ICT service providers
So, given our experience, what have we learned so far about how best to support an intelligent customer? What are the critical factors for ICT service providers to best enable NDA to deliver its mission?
Here are three lessons that we think are important for the future. Firstly, real customer intimacy is key, in combination with a collective will to succeed. Secondly, an ability to think holistically and remain agile is essential. Thirdly, the ability to balance tight risk management with innovation is important to deliver value and accelerate the necessary progress. Framing all of this must be a strong shared ambition that acts as a north star for all parties at all times.
Let’s look at examples of these lessons in action.
Firstly, customer intimacy in combination with a will to succeed
A recent migration project carried out within the industry was a significant milestone involving the transition of over 150 applications, tools and services.
The scale of the task required the involvement of over 150 people from Sellafield, Atos, Capgemini and BT, all working together to ensure the migrations were completed safely, on time, and with minimal impact on the business.
At times this was a difficult piece of work, with many moving parts and a high number of technical and logistic challenges to address. However, with close collaboration and drawing on innate knowledge of this specific operational environment, all partners worked effectively to address the issues, complete the mission and ensure that all services were maintained.
Secondly, an ability to think holistically and remain agile
We recently saw the importance of joined-up thinking underlined on a program to maintain a technology network that Scottish Water uses to manage and distribute its water and wastewater. This comprises IT that connects its staff and offices, and OT that connects the machines and devices that operate its physical water system.
One project was working to a critical and immovable deadline by which technology would no longer be supported. Given multiple suppliers and complex interdependencies between IT and OT, this was not a matter of working in a linear way and simply plugging in new devices.
More holistic thinking was needed. Three things proved essential to this: robust tools and processes; deep engagement of people to build the necessary vision and culture; and availability of shared data for evidence-based decision-making at all times. With these in place, all partners could work in an integrated and agile way to deliver a technically complex transformation on time.
Finally, the need to balance tight risk management with innovation
Clearly, the nature of decommissioning means that all change must be tightly controlled. Yet while robust risk management is vital, so too is the need for innovation.
We have seen this balance over the course of every Summer and Winter Olympic Games since Barcelona 1992. Over the decades, the IT needed to run the Games has transformed. Back in 1992, IT infrastructure and services were built from scratch in each host city. Now they’re delivered from the cloud. And there are many other instances of digital transformation over time.
Yet while keeping pace with change is essential, so too is utter reliability and resilience across a large multi-supplier environment to deliver one of the highest-profile events on earth. Over the years, there has been a tight focus on knowledge management, together with collaboration on detailed and evolving innovation roadmaps, for example to maximise automation and modernise, standardise and simplify legacy IT.
High stakes, critical opportunities
We know that high-availability and cost-efficient ICT services are foundational for NDA. However, our experience is that we deliver outcomes faster and better when we work collaboratively, holistically and innovatively – always bounded by a shared commitment to our customer’s ambition.
Put simply: intelligent customers need intelligent providers. That means partners who are business-centric and join the dots, instead of suppliers who just monitor and deliver IT. This is about evolution, not revolution, with close collaboration between NDA Group and its partners to ensure continuity.
The stakes are high: for the industry, the taxpayer, and the environment. Meeting these challenges together over the next decade will shape a critical timeline spanning more than a century. This is a unique mission, helping Civil Nuclear to secure a safe and sustainable future for generations to come.
Posted on: 18/12/2024
Leigh Seaman
Client Executive Partner
