The dual service delivery pillars to successful enterprisewide automation
SKILLS & EXPERTISE
- Focus on a pragmatic consulting-led approach to understand the business challenge, and then work with existing applications to extend and enhance. This is likely to involve design thinking, bringing different stakeholders together to ideate and develop proofs of concept and align to common outcome objectives.
- Focus on business need and keeping users at the center. Remain focused on the business need, addressing users within and across teams. The PoC/MVP phase is when the different technology options can be considered and tested.
- Enhance new ways of working to create a modern workplace environment. Empower and reskill your teams using modern workplace tools so that they become used to working with the latest technology. This is also about future-proofing your workforce.
- Bring deep technical knowledge to evaluate and curate the right technologies that can scale. Ensure your teams are trained and/or certified with a proven track record in delivering best in class solutions.
ADOPTION & CULTURE
- Engage a highly placed sponsor who can influence others and support the long-term vision. This is especially important for complex change programs like enterprise automation, since projects will require careful negotiation across IT and business teams.
- A strong but realistic ambition supported by a rigorous business case. This will ensure that the CIO and other senior leadership are on board and committed to the success of the project.
- The establishment of an operational model and governance structure for enterprise automation. This is particularly important if building a new digital innovation factory or center of excellence where different stakeholders are involved.
- An implementation process that is supported by a multidisciplinary team and agile delivery methods. This is critical to ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction and engaging the best people.
- Do not force adoption of the tools; allow them to develop at the rhythm of the needs of users and along with other technological innovations.
Use-case 6: Global Technology Equipment OEM Extends Support for New SMB Customers with ServiceNow Implementation productivity suite
IDC View: The client needed to move from an ageing, highly customized IT service management platform to a new solution to help it to transform processes and improve customer experience. Moving to ServiceNow, it has been able to support new business and revenue streams with SMB customers.
IDC spoke with Otakar Vlasak, principal consultant at Devoteam, to discuss the project and learnings.
The change in mindset of all stakeholders to agile development has been key to the technology transformation and to bringing IT and the business together.
The client is a leading services provider with 9,000 employees, delivering enterprise-level IT solutions to more than 500,000 customers. It also provides document management services and multifunctional peripherals to businesses.
The Business Challenge
The client’s European business looked for key improvements in its service management platform to enables faster market response and quicker implementation of new innovative products and services, notably a new platform that enables the company to deliver an all-in-one IT managed service for small and midsize customers. Through the platform the client can offer services such as printing, service desk, backup, and security as a service. The existing customized ITSM system was not able to handle these new services for external IT services customers.
The Solution
The company needed to modernize its IT management platform, which was a complex, highly customized tool that lacked flexibility and couldn’t easily be upgraded to meet changing business requirements.
The client chose a new cloud-based ServiceNow solution to support both the customer service management (CSM) and field service management (FSM) needs of its customers.
As a long-term partner for the client’s European IT business, Devoteam was already supporting the existing ITSM platform. Devoteam provided consultancy and advisory services as a multivendor agnostic provider during the investigation phase, which resulted in the recommendation of the new ServiceNow solution.
Devoteam then provided the solution design, deployment, and configuration, as well as ongoing cooperation on further improvements, integration with other systems and data sources, training, and L3 operational support.
Outcomes
One integrated platform to manage interactions with customers. Replacing legacy solutions with a single platform and data source has improved user satisfaction and productivity, enabling faster time to market for customers’ new services and products. This is also future-proofed to support new types of services that the customer plans to roll out, such as ITBM (IT Business Management).
Improved CSM and FSM user experience. The customer now has a faster, more efficient platform with a modern user-friendly interface. The additional benefits of this are getting staff up and running on the solution quickly. Manual tasks have been automated so service agents can spend more time responding to customer queries. Meanwhile, better transparency helps the customer to build more trust with its own customers.
Innovation of customers’ own development processes Devoteam’s involvement in the continuous improvement and agile development approach helped to increase cooperation among teams and key business stakeholders.
Key Learnings
One of the key lessons learned from the incumbent solution was that heavy customization can slow down innovation. Therefore, understanding and utilizing ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box features were key to ensuring ongoing agility during the development process.
The new agile development approach enabled a change in mindset across the business and IT teams, and helped to build overall trust and stakeholder engagement, which finally led to the smooth go-live.
Ongoing support from Devoteam’s ServiceNow center of excellence (CoE) ensures that the customer is continuously updated with the latest opportunities with ServiceNow.
Next Steps
Based on the successful rollout of the CSM and FSM modules, Devoteam is now working with the client to implement a pilot of ServiceNow ITBM focused on the demand and project management processes. They are also preparing for a further ITSM transition from the legacy system.
