UK retail house adopts ServiceNow

This leading UK chain of department stores is of world renown. Its outlets are known for architectural innovation and have a reputation for being ‘every shop you’ll ever need’. Across each department, from food to fashion, home to beauty, the company sets the standard for up-to-the-minute style, lasting quality and exceptional customer service.

Main challenges

Driving change to support growth Our customer has a culture and heritage steeped in quality and innovation. With four stores in the UK and stores in Canada, as well as a subsidiary in Ireland, aspects of the supporting IT environments had lagged behind this exceedingly high standard. Growth had also resulted in organisational change which, in turn, would drive change in the supporting systems. Our customer was using a number of platforms – Lotus Notes, email, and in-house developed utilities – for its IT service management function, supported by old processes: incident management consisted primarily of call-logging, leaving little visibility of an incident’s status; manual updating with inevitable replication was time-consuming; different repositories for user information and IT assets added complexity and effort. This meant there was no easy basis for the introduction of governance by service levels. Looking to the future, a number of the chain’s brand values would dictate the extent of change needed to set a new standard for ITSM within the organisation. Innovation and inspiration – a service desk with a modern user experience:

• Teamwork and sharing – developing common experiences into knowledge to drive first-time fixes;
• Best practice – guided by ITIL standards a new solution should be unencumbered by previous releases; and
• Service – easy-to-use, branded self-service portals for dedicated request management as well as a service catalogue to transform how the IT service desk brings value to and is viewed within the business.

The head of IT service delivery at the customer explains: “In all we needed a more integrated, coherent solution to help consolidate disparate processes, establish a knowledge base, introduce service and, as a consequence, contribute to a set of changes to elevate the role of IT within the organisation.”

What did we solve?

Modern customer service facility Following a thorough review of the market, and a formal RFP process, our customer chose ServiceNow, the SaaS-based leader for ESM, for its workflow engine, along with Devoteam as specialists in IT transformation. Devoteam employed its unique implementation method, RAPID, to introduce the incident, problem and change management modules to cover the core ITSM processes. Importantly, RAPID involves the customer’s administration team in a strong delivery timetable to facilitate quick transfer of ownership to broaden understanding of the overall solution as well as reduce costs. Multiple email domains for two-way communications were set up and integrated with Lotus Notes to provide user and manager notifications. A CMDB was populated to reflect the IT estate and user login automated via Active Directory integration. Knowledge of incidents and problems was transferred from existing information sources, and the reporting facility was tuned to provide information to management about improved service levels. The new system creates an incident record through an email trigger from users while enabling such a record to register a change. The customer continues: “With guidance from Devoteam, we saw how a stylised self-service portal would fulfil a number of needs across our own shops and our Irish subsidiary. To that end we engaged our design agency to ensure that what was developed was consistent with our brand standards.” Users may view the progress of requests and incidents as well as access a context-sensitive knowledge base of issues that relate to their location and beyond. Approvals for service or hardware requests can now be made from hand-held devices. A facility to accommodate on-boarding of new staff as well as staff changes was added. A user-friendly service catalogue, entirely in keeping with the company’s design palette, has rendered the request procedure simpler and more pleasant. Throughout the implementation Devoteam conducted a programme of user acceptance testing. At the point of release they oversaw training for 100 users, in line with the train-the-trainer element that features in our RAPID method.

Main benefits

Enhancing business performance Through ServiceNow the organisation has benefited from process automation and management information that enables better operational decisions and improved customer service across the organisation.

The Head of IT Service Delivery concludes: “Thanks to Devoteam we can now concentrate resources to eliminate service interruption to the business, manage problems, control change and provide the business management with information on the IT infrastructure.”

Devoteam has delivered an integrated ITSM suite in the cloud that our customer can now expand into release management. Darrell Woods, Sales Manager at Devoteam added: “As one of the UK’s most distinguished institutions our client sets the pace in retail for others to follow. It is fitting, therefore, that Devoteam, one of Europe’s leading specialists in IT transformation, should be invited to work in partnership with them to accelerate their journey to automate IT.”