Case studies  | PriceWaterhouseCoopers

"We didn't ask them for a proof of concept, but as part of the RFP, they showed us what our ITSM processes would look like in ServiceNow." –Ronald Hunse, manager of IT Operations for PricewaterhouseCoopers in the Netherlands

This ServiceNow case study is based on an interview with Ronald Hunse, manager of IT Operations for PricewaterhouseCoopers in the Netherlands.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) provides industry-focused assurance, tax and advisory services. More than 163,000 people in 151 countries in PwC's global network develop fresh perspectives and practical advice. PwC Netherlands offers these services to more than 20 different industries.

Our IT organization comprises three departments. The first interacts with our clients, our end users in the business, and the business management team. The second is a team of project managers, developers and engineers who build our applications. The third is the IT operations department, for which I am responsible.

Our total network numbers around 5,000 employees, and about 160 of us work within IT.

Legacy service management system had to go

The biggest reason we had to change our ITSM tools is that we were using HP Service Center. We foresaw the need for two major implementations within the next three years because HP was about to introduce a new version of Service Manager and we were still in version 4. We were looking for less expensive and, if possible, better service management tools.

Also, our complete service management landscape comprised about seven different tools which were not integrated. It was a stable situation even though there were a number of different moving parts, but it was costly, and it would have been even more costly to upgrade the existing tools.

What we had in place was not standard by any means, so we had developed it extensively, using custom applications. If we chose the upgrade-route, we would have to patch all of that development work, which would take a lot of time and people from our IT organization. 

So we wanted to have a single, new, integrated service management tool which we could work with far into the future. We also wanted an internal help desk tool in a portal which HR, Facilities and the firm's other services could use to log their own issues and find their own knowledge, if necessary. Also, we outsource many of our services, so we wanted to be able to use this same service management tool with our external vendors so that we could work easily with them.

Searching for the right tool

We made a long list of applications that might be a solution for us and pared it down to a short list of three ITSM applications. As an accounting firm, we have always favored safe, proven technologies, but since software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the future in my opinion, and because more and more businesses require SaaS applications, we dropped our insistence on the proven technology approach and examined SaaS very closely. We already had experience working with SaaS applications within the IT department, so we knew it would be easier for the future to service our business as it moves toward SaaS. 

We put out a request for proposal (RFP) to several vendors, most of whom answered with text-based documents. The funny thing is that ServiceNow not only sent a document, but they also built a proof of concept that contained almost half of what we asked for in the RFP. We didn't ask them for a proof of concept, but as part of the RFP, they showed us what our application would look like in ServiceNow. The response was much more than we expected and much more than we got from other vendors. 

We also asked for a meeting with ServiceNow, and we posed several questions during the presentation. One of the ServiceNow developers was working quietly in the back of the room, and after we had asked most of our questions, he demonstrated to us how the tool could do the things that we were asking for, even the custom functionality. So within one hour, he had made ServiceNow do things that were not in the basic tool. We were very impressed by how flexible the tool was. 

We could see that we would not be forced into an out-of-the-box model, and that we would be able to implement the tool in the best way for our business. Also, none of that added functionality is lost when you upgrade to new releases of ServiceNow. 

We had been dreading the upgrade to a new service management tool, and suddenly with ServiceNow, we saw that we would implement once and never have to re-implement. This meant we could focus on the charter of our IT organization, which is to service the business, not to set up a new service management tool every two or three years.

Why ServiceNow?

We were still concerned that we would lose all of our custom development work with each new upgrade to ServiceNow, but so far, we have had only small issues with that. All the development we do ourselves is still in the system even after an upgrade, and there are three major upgrades per year. In fact, some of the special development work done for PwC is now integrated into the tool and goes out to all ServiceNow users. There are also predefined business scripts and bits of code in the ServiceNow community pages and wiki that many different customers can use. 

And this is not just our own custom development. You can easily integrate all the processes that you made before, say in Lotus Notes or in other tools, to ServiceNow. For instance, we had a purchasing module as part of an outsource management system. Within about two weeks, we had built a purchasing module within ServiceNow with links to all the service requests that were coming in. So, if we have to order something, the purchase order gets generated from the request. Two weeks is a very short time to develop a new module. 

The tool is user-friendly because people are used to working with all kind of Websites nowadays when they shop on the Web. ServiceNow has the same look and feel as many Web-based applications, so for young people, it's quite intuitive. We had very few difficulties migrating from the previous application. In fact, we did not spend too much time in training people on ServiceNow because they understood quite easily how things work. 

Of course, it also helps that the people behind ServiceNow are the same people who were behind Peregrine in the past, so the same people made many of the procedures that were in the old system. It's a small step to go from Peregrine Service Center to ServiceNow, probably a smaller step than to go from Peregrine to the new HP Service Manager. 

We were very concerned about offshore data. As a European company, we did not want to have our data inside of the U.S. for various reasons. We asked ServiceNow whether they had a data center in Europe so that our data would be onshore, and so they opened a European data center. We were one of their first users here in the Europe. That played a big role in our being able to build the business case for ServiceNow.

Advantages of SaaS tools for service management

SaaS makes it easy to access the tools from everywhere you have Internet access with the right credentials. We also grant secure access to some of our vendors, so it's easy for them to use, and easy for us to collaborate more closely with our external partners.

In IT, since we are always wary of upgrading our tools, we're pleased that ServiceNow does all of that work. We don't need to look after the hardware, either.

We wanted to have the IT experience of SaaS to prepare for the day when other applications in the firm go the SaaS route. We had been concerned about security and performance, but so far these have never been issues for us. 

We used to have two administrators for our previous service management tool, but now we're down to one person. If the load spikes, or if we need to redeploy personnel, it's easy to scale with somebody at ServiceNow or one of their resellers to help support the application, because from their end they can also access the system.

Facts and figures on the implementation

We are about 160 people working in the system, and we are not completely done customizing it yet. There are some people within facilities and HR also working occasionally with the system, but we plan to invite them to work completely in it. Some of them hesitate, but the tool certainly accommodates it. It's even easy to have a separate instance that HR alone can access, and within the same cost construction; they are afraid that the IT people will have access to HR materials, but it's quite easy to create a separate instance that only HR can access.

We did not think it was wise to start only with incident and change. So we had a big bang implementation – about eight or nine processes at once – and it took just under 15 months. I think we could have done it in much less time had our request module not been so complicated; that alone took almost six months. 

With our service request module, all service line managers had different processes for implementing ServiceNow, and this slowed down the implementation. If you know what you want, it's quite easy, but it took us some time to ascertain from the business managers what they really wanted. This took more time than to actually build it. We had to make the same request for four different services and they were all a little bit different.

Request fulfillment

There's a lot of visible detail and sophistication now in our workflows in the area of request and ordering. It's easy to fill the catalog with all of our internal items, including those provided by facilities and HR. When somebody submits a request that requires several tasks or involves different departments, you can always see the status and location of the request. 

Our users enter many more of their own tickets, even outside business hours. Our help desk used to be open 14 hours a day, but with the self-service portal we have reduced that to ten hours a day. 

Also, our users find it much easier now to see the status of the request or incident that they have reported to the help desk. We used to have people call the help desk all the time asking for updates, and now we've moved all of those inquiries to ServiceNow's service desk. 

Many of our users are not continuously online, but use a Blackberry. And I think more than half of the approvals now are given by Blackberry instead of from a computer. 

We are very happy with the reporting functionality in ServiceNow. We used to have multiple, disparate reporting tools, but now they're integrated, and with each upgrade we see even more functionality for reporting.

High volume in ServiceNow

We've been pleasantly surprised with ServiceNow's handling of the volume of activity in our organization. We have highly secure, daily uploads from the HR system, so we know what people are working on inside of PwC. We built the service portal within our own company portal, and users can hardly tell that it's different from the business portal. 

We have high call-volume and high request-volume every month. Our catalog is up to about 1,400 items, which are almost all IT-related now, and we are planning to add catalog items that are not IT-related. It's quite easy to maintain a catalog of this size and you don't need to know much about the system to handle it. 

The single, biggest area of improvement has been the cooperation and teamwork between our operations and application development teams. Thanks to ITIL processes and meetings, we've avoided many of the past situations in which we wanted to make a change and did not understand the impact that it would have on another team, or didn't understand the need to schedule the change around a major project or initiative.

More shared services, software asset management coming

Our next plan is for a module especially for software asset management. We are building a connection to Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), so as soon as there is a new request coming in for software, the representatives handling the request can see our current inventory of licenses. If we're out of licenses, they can easily buy one through the purchasing module. 

We're getting a lot out of ServiceNow in the area of new employee setup. Every new hire comes with a set of requirements: computer, business cards, parking spot, badge, just to name a few. All of these things come from different departments and we want to be able to initiate everything through the same portal, such that there will be just one setup, with tasks going separately to IT, HR, facilities, secretaries, etc. 

So we plan on extending the system to HR and facilities. For instance, whenever there is a setup for a new staff member, you can have contracts created for that person. We want to make ServiceNow the entry point for all those things, through the same portal. 

We want to examine the planning functionality inside ServiceNow. Fewer of our employees have their own workspace, so they must share guest offices with other people when they're on site. We'd like to be able to plan that space using ServiceNow and get rid of some of the tools we've been using for that up to now.