The initiative is part of Standard Life's Digital Workplace strategic program, which is designed to streamline its IT services across all its businesses in Europe, North America and Asia, providing its employees globally with a consolidated, enhanced and digitally-enabled working environment so they can better support the company's growth agenda, and reduce operating costs.

The project delivered the upgrade from Windows XP to the Windows 7 operating system for over 11,000 desktops globally. This included migration to a single mail platform, the introduction of various collaboration tools to improve productivity, and the training of Standard Life employees in six different business units across 14 countries.

"The implementation of Digital Workplace allowed us to reduce our application estate by 60%, cut log-in time by 15 minutes and increase our pace of work through better collaboration," said Paul Chong, Director of Group IT at Standard Life. "From a business perspective, this lays the foundation blocks for improving our customer engagement as we continue to develop our Digital agenda. This has been one of the largest and most complex global IT projects we have undertaken, and we are proud to have completed it in less than 18 months. We would not have achieved this outcome without Accenture's experience in workplace transformation services and industry knowledge, and Avanade's expertise in implementing Microsoft technology."

"CIOs have a number of tools at their disposal today to drive higher levels of workforce performance and lower IT costs," said Gary Taylor, Accenture's Infrastructure Services Lead in Scotland. "Advanced collaboration technologies and mobile, cloud and network solutions can be part of any CIO's toolkit to create an intelligent infrastructure that enables greater social collaboration among employees at any time, from any place, via any device. With all its employees now operating on a modern technology solution, Standard Life is establishing an infrastructure that unleashes new levels of workforce efficiency, agility and productivity."

Ryan Ferguson, Infrastructure Services Director, Avanade UK added: "Transforming the workplace to become more digitally focused has become a key consideration for enterprises such as Standard Life, and ensuring a smooth transition process is also absolutely critical. As companies upgrade to a new operating system, this is also a great opportunity for them to transform the way people work so the environment becomes optimized for digital and collaboration. Our expertise and global delivery centre model meant we could operate swiftly and effectively to build an entirely new business process for Standard Life in just over six months. This process has allowed Standard Life to completely redesign how work is done."