Deloitte harnesses ServiceNow IT Business Management

As a world leader in professional services, Deloitte knows how to innovate and meet client requirements to a high standard. The professional services network uses ServiceNow IT Business Management and ServiceNow digital workflows to operate efficiently and deliver on client projects. 

Once Deloitte had achieved initial success with query management, the team began examining opportunities to use ServiceNow to digitise workflows across the organisation. An apples-for-apples comparison delivered a compelling result: “Testing how we could benefit from building on the platform to solve for medium complexity process with some integrations we realised massive cost and time savings with ServiceNow,” says McIntyre “Time savings are a huge business benefit in the professional services industry, and Deloitte realised savings in the order of a 50% to 80% reduction in time to build applications.”

Deloitte is also a welcome guest on ServiceNow's Neighbourhood series. 

Matt McIntyre, Partner, Enterprise Program Officer, ANZ, Deloitte joined us to discuss their use of ServiceNow to build apps and improve prioritisation, dashboarding and other key elements of project portfolio management. 

The Enterprise Program team oversees investment portfolios in the region, working closely with businesses to ensure investments are properly prioritised and managed over their life cycles.

McIntyre has worked with ServiceNow since 2008. He first used the Now Platform® to support operations for the newly created ‘Deloitte Digital’ division. “I was after an ITS end-solution,” he explains. “We’re delivering digital products to clients and we needed to [triage and manage] incidents and calls.” 

McIntyre signed up to a developer initiative, gained access and began exploring ServiceNow platform capabilities. In 2014, when the Deloitte Quality and Risk function approached his team for assistance in managing queries from business services professionals, Deloitte conducted an evaluation process and opted to procure ServiceNow. 

“We started with ServiceNow as a platform and built a query management system that helped the quality and risk team manage queries from the business,” McIntyre says. The project required Deloitte to transition gigabytes of case emails into ServiceNow to support a system that still runs today, along with many other platform applications. 

The team now maintains nearly 25 ServiceNow applications. They include an app used to set up engagements in core finance systems, and others that help with everything from recruitment management and approval processes, to outsourced offshore payroll processing. 

Deloitte evaluated a range of systems before opting for ServiceNow IT Business Management to undertake project portfolio management.  McIntyre explains the Now Platform capabilities won out, particularly for its unique digital workflow capability, along with dashboarding, recording, configurability and user interface. 

Looking ahead the business saw further improvements in IT Business Management. "Globally, Deloitte [was] going through transformation,” McIntyre says. That exercise entailed introducing a form of globalisation to a network of member firms that had traditionally operated individually in different markets. 

Deloitte’s global IT operation was looking at better ways to deliver services to internal clients, their clients and their customers, and strongly recommended ServiceNow. Deloitte Australia then deployed IT Business Management in April of 2019 and followed up with IT Service Management three months later. 

In the last year, Deloitte has partnered with ServiceNow for project portfolio management. “A really good lesson when you’re evaluating the best capability for your business needs, you’ve really got to look at a vendor and what deep industry and product knowledge they have, and the changes they are making in their products to help you advance what you’re doing,” says McIntyre.

ServiceNow has also helped Deloitte solve the complex issue of project prioritisation – a task that was eating up time better used for execution. “We think we’ve found a happy middle ground in the last 12 months where we’ve moved to a quarterly prioritisation model,” says McIntyre. “With ideas and demands captured in ServiceNow IT Business Management.” 

In addition, ServiceNow has enabled the team to build dashboards and tweak them on the fly to meet the demands of stakeholders or audiences. 

Deloitte has now extended ServiceNow IT Business Management to capture – at a project level – all the impacts of changes affecting the audiences and user groups within its organisation. These changes include new marketing campaigns, new talent initiatives, new IT system implementations and new product builds to meet client briefs. 

“We’re able to take that information and surface it out to a dashboard and answer the question of whether we are making too many changes at one time for a particular group, or can we combine some messages and create a consistent narrative going to the business,” McIntyre tells us. “That’s a really powerful thing for us to do with the platform and something that doesn’t come out of the box.”   

McIntyre also shared the key building blocks of building an enterprise project management office and successfully adopting underlying technologies: “It comes back to putting the user at the centre of what you’re doing and solving the questions that we had,” he says. 

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