CIO interview Ben Hetherington: B&Q owner Kingfisher flies across Europe in the cloud

Kingfisher's group service delivery manager explains how the firm is standardising its UK and European services onto one platform with help from the cloud

Kingfisher is Europe's largest DIY retailer with more than 78,000 employees and a heavy UK presence represented by more than 350 B&Q stores across the country. A series of different brands across Europe, including French firms Castorama and Brico Dépôt, each had their own IT departments operating in different ways, but now the group is refurbishing its estate so that eventually every outlet across the continent will run on the same systems.

"We haven't completely overhauled everything where all the retailers are on the same system yet, but we're heading in that direction," Ben Hetherington, group service delivery manager for Kingfisher IT Services, told Computing.

"What we have been doing is to host more of the group's applications from our UK datacentres, operating to the same standards, putting them on the same platforms and operating systems, supporting applications necessary onto the standards we've chosen.

"There's still some work to do in terms of standardisation, and we're moving people along onto some big programmes that we'll be starting up and running for the next few years to achieve that," he said.

The challenge has been to devise a strategy that will allow the use of shared services across the continent, to replace the separate European and UK set-ups with a common tool. Initially, Kingfisher examined the extension of its UK tools to Europe, but "because it was set up for a single customer", Hetherington explained, "it would have needed to be started from scratch; it would have been a long and expensive project to do that".

It was decided that cloud hosting would have a key role in Kingfisher's IT strategy, and ServiceNow was chosen after impressing during a selection process.

"What was key to us was they were seen as market leaders," said Hetherington. "Some of the other suppliers we looked at, and are used to dealing with, are definitely followers who were unable to give us as clear technological strategy over what they wanted to do in the coming years, whereas ServiceNow came across as experts leading the market and setting up standards for the next few years."

Since selecting ServiceNow at the end of last year, Kingfisher has been working on a two-stage programme, replacing the incumbent tools in the UK in the first stage, and then replacing the European set-up in the second stage of that strategy. The programme is far from complete, but the group has already started seeing benefits.

"We're halfway along the journey at the moment and all we've done really is replace the UK side of it, but it has already given us some benefits in terms of improved functionality. By and large though, the single biggest benefit will be when we've got one single group tool in both locations," said Hetherington.

Other benefits already seen through ServiceNow and slimming down to a single system include better scheduling and configuration across the group's shared services.

"We're using the tool in the UK for all our service management processes, but in Europe we are using it for change and configuration. So just having a single tool for change and configuration is helping us; there's some functionality in ServiceNow around the central change calendar that's helping us to schedule our changes better. And when we've got a group run with shared services, that's increasingly important to us," Hetherington explained, adding that there have also been big benefits in self-service and automation in Europe, which will be rolled out across the UK next year.

"In terms of self-service and automation, we recognise there are some big benefits; we recognise and want to get on board with in the UK and get our users to have some automation around their service requests," he said, pointing out that it also brings the added benefits of cost saving and an improved user experience.

"We're looking forward to some big savings on that because it'll automate some things that are happening manually at the moment at service desk level and it'll also give a better user experience, with a lot more automation work. These are tricky processes to get right, manually they can go wrong, so, if we can automate that, I think we can offer a much better experience for users."

In addition, with the aid of ServiceNow, Kingfisher hopes to offer a more up-to-date online shopping functionality.

"We're replacing a text-based service with what will be in ServiceNow a much more modern web shopping experience, and our users are really keen to get on board with it. That will be IT and non-IT functionality involved in that service request."

CIO interview Ben Hetherington: B&Q owner Kingfisher flies across Europe in the cloud

Kingfisher's group service delivery manager explains how the firm is standardising its UK and European services onto one platform with help from the cloud

For Kingfisher, the adoption of ServiceNow marks a major foray into the cloud, and the company has come away impressed – to such an extent that it's looking to expand its cloud solution, even using different providers when necessary.

"We're looking at it more and more and we've gone to a cloud-based proxy server, so we're considering different technologies where it's appropriate. SAP has some cloud solutions we're looking at, but ServiceNow is the biggest thing we've done so far," said Hetherington.

Kingfisher is preparing to upgrade its vast desktop estate, with Hetherington looking to move the organisation on from an infrastructure based around the aging Windows XP operating system, as Microsoft's extended support for it ends in April next year.

"We're still mostly on XP," he told Computing. "There is a project running that is starting to roll-out Windows 7 but it's going to be a long process to get that out to the entire group, and there are some older legacy applications that we'll need to amend first, but we want to get onto Windows 7 and Office 2013 in the next one to two years."

That process will be supported by Kingfisher's 450-strong UK-based IT department, which supports a further 30,000 employees in the UK alone. That's less than half of the group's total staff, but, as Hetherington points out, many of them don't need a desktop PC for the majority of their work.

"We support a large number of staff, but a lot of them are based in stores serving customers and are not heavy IT users."

However, that doesn't mean maintaining IT across the group is a simple task, with the various arms of the businesses requiring different forms of support.

"We've got several different brands and we do different things for different customers. For example, here in the UK, we run all of B&Q's IT and most of the operational side of trade tools supplier Screwfix – it's a bit of a mixed bag," said Hetherington.

Additional projects in the pipeline for Kingfisher include improving web commerce with Oracle and the possibility of big data solutions with SAP, demonstrating flexibility when it comes to selecting service providers.

"There's an ATG [web commerce service centre] going on for B&Q to deliver website and customer ordering functionality, which could be used across the group. We're looking at SAP HANA for data mining, which will be a group-wide application," said Hetherington, who emphasised once again that the main aim for IT strategy moving forward is standardisation of all IT infrastructure across both the UK and continental Europe.

"The key is going to be centralisation and commonality wherever we can," he said. "Clearly, if we've got different brands using different legacy tools for the same functions, we want to get more commonality where we can. So SAP could be a big roll-out for us, replacing some legacy tools, so that's going to take a large portion of time."

"We need to get some commonality in terms of our email solutions. We've got different solutions across the estate so we need to try and standardise on a common set of tools," he added.

Given the complexity of the task, Hetherington says it's going to take some time for B&Q, Screwfix and every other member of the Kingfisher group to build and deploy its new centralised strategy.

"There is a roadmap that is actually going through approval at the moment, but it's a long-term strategy that will take a number of years."