Hitachi Consulting UK to deliver change management programme for UK's NATS
The change management programme is expected to pave the way for NATS’ implementation of a multi-million pound project to transfer all of its desktop IT services to the cloud, and is said to be the largest implementation of cloud-based infrastructure in the UK transport sector to date.
NATS was seeking to reduce its costs by £9 million over the next four years, shrink its environmental footprint, improve flexibility and enhance the service it provides to around 6,000 staff. The company not only wanted to enable staff to access information more easily and provide greater mobility, but also needed to align its IT with its future growth strategy to accommodate future scenarios, such as potential acquisitions and joint ventures that may require greater scalability and flexibility.
To achieve this, NATS needed to create a change management programme to support delivery of its future workspace vision.
Gavin Walker, head of information solutions for NATS, explained: “Hitachi Consulting understood the vision and strategy of what we were trying to achieve. They could make the leap between the technical requirements, the business impact on people’s behaviours and what this would mean for the day-to-day style of working. Hitachi Consulting was very focused on streams of activity, building training processes with our IS teams, creating change agents and working with our delivery change leaders internally.”
Hitachi Consulting defined a change framework for engaging the organisation, and tested this in a series of workshops with pilot groups. Hitachi Consulting then built the IS team capability, engaging with the business, building interest in the project and driving management ownership of the benefits. Once completed, the Change Management programme is expected to support the new IT vision. It will help enable NATS to deliver more effective collaboration between internal staff and business partners across NATS locations and over multiple geographic regions.
The programme is designed to create a customised experience for NATS’ staff by facilitating their access to the services, information and applications they need for their particular role, and enabling NATS’ employees to access their virtualised applications on any technology device in a much more mobile friendly and accessible environment. The project is designed to be an enabler of NATS’ growth strategy, and, according to Hitachi Consulting, will provide the company with a flexible and responsive IT framework that doesn’t add to its footprint.
