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» July 2009
Project Report and lessons learned on the Liberty Life Technical Upgrade – Johann van Tonder

Liberty sold its first insurance policy 50 years ago and has since become one of South Africa’s leading insurance and investment groups. In 2007, the group collected more than R30 billion in insurance premiums and had R221 billion in total assets.  

Recently a team from Barnstone was responsible for the technical upgrade project at Liberty Life. A technical upgrade is performed to update and replace the technology of an existing ERP application without changing the standard functionality or degree of complexity. This lean approach to change minimises potential disruptions by ensuring the continuity of business operations and system stability while the upgrade is executed.

The project started towards the end of March and the SAP ecc5 environment was upgraded to SAP ecc6 and the SAP Portal 6 environment to Portal 7. The project was delivered on time and on budget on the 19th of June. Currently Barnstone also have two SAP financial consultants working at Liberty Life as part of the internal SAP support team. We hope to continue and grow our relationship and to secure more work at Liberty Life in the future.         Intellectual Property, Copyright and Piracy The broad system access that was required by our team to perform the work at Liberty Life made me realise the responsibility that we have in dealing reliably with the information of our clients. Just like we protect out personal property and information we have the responsibility to manage the intellectual property of our clients sensibly and with respect. Everyone working at a client should understand the restrictions imposed by non-disclosure agreements and should request clarity in situations where it is not apparent. 

During the upgrade project I also realised how valuable our existing knowledge, documentation and templates are in the acceleration of a project and in the reduction of risk. In the world of corporate services intellectual property is a business, financial and competitive asset and we should treat it as valuable and protect it. In what is known as the information age the amount of information is overwhelming and the value of summarised and structured “knowledge”  is often underestimated.

Today we live in an electronic world of iPod’s, Cell Phones, MP3’s, DivX and pdf ebooks. The replication of electronic material is easy and our children grow up with an “everybody does it” mentality where licensing and copyright is conveniently ignored.

Apart from the legal implications in downloading copyrighted material there is also the practical risk of virus and spyware infection. We should use the Barnstone infrastructure responsibly and ensure that our applications are licensed and that we do not keep illegal documents, games, music and videos on our computers.