Abbey banks on intranet bookstore

Abbey has completed a restructure of its internal information systems, an initiative that has seen the consolidation of eight departmental intranets, and the migration of 100,000 pages of technical manuals to an online repository.

The company’s 22,000 employees now have instant access to its ‘Bookstore’ – a database of product policies and procedures, via the intranet. The system incorporates an audit trail facility that staff can use to access product specifications from up to five years ago, enabling instant checks and verification of policies or mortgages on the date they were purchased.

Previously, although certain manuals were available online, they were separate from Abbey’s other systems, a problem that the project has resolved. “The user now gets a single system to see all the information they need and they can use sales and technical data as part of the same information set. They can also search all the information in a single search,” says Peter Greenfield, online channels manager at Abbey. “For those that do not search, the navigation is the same for all information and this makes access easier and quicker.”

It is hoped that the system will also boost Abbey’s regulatory compliance and corporate governance efforts, by making the most up-to-date product information available to its customers. All financial institutions in the UK must adhere to standards set out in the Financial Services Act and the Credit Consumer Act – an area in which effective audit trails and archiving systems can have a positive influence.

“The new system allows us to roll back more easily to older versions of information, but also controls who can authorise the release of information more closely. In the long run, we will have a safer and easier to retrieve archive, which will give us greater confidence in compliance and customer service,” says Greenfield.

Abbey deployed web-content technology from Open Text to facilitate the project. www.opentext.com.