Creating a portal to accelerate digital transformation

A digital ecosystem of service providers
Copenhagen Airport is Denmark’s main international airport. In 2019 it served more than 30 million customers and is one of the busiest transit points for Scandinavia.

Size is not everything. Copenhagen Airport has been awarded the title of Europe’s most efficient airport in 14 of the last 16 years. An award of which it is hugely proud.

“It’s not only passengers that choose us, but it is also the other businesses that work with us,” says Christian Hjortkjaer, Head of IT Asset & Service Management, Copenhagen Airport, “from retailers to food service providers to baggage handlers.”

The airport has around 2,000 employees but includes more than 20,000 employees in its network of service providers.

Copenhagen Airport wants to streamline its operations by digitizing the connections between parties. It wants to layer on a digital experience for passengers – the ability to order food in advance, or a valet for your car, with the smartness of a modern public venue, with proactive service rotas, IoT sensors, and automated environmental management.

Implementation agility generates momentum
ServiceNow IT Service Management creates a service home for the airport’s 20,000+ users. Launched in 2017, the portal has grown from housing 20 request forms and 200 Knowledge Base articles to 300 request forms and more than 1,400 articles.

The portal can be accessed, securely via a webpage, by anyone with a Copenhagen Airport ID. A dedicated team works with the business and the local ServiceNow partner, BusinessNow, to find, design, and launch new services.

“Our in-house team can usually manage the launch of a new service, but for more complicated projects we’ll involve BusinessNow. There are times when it’s important to have local expertise onsite,” says Christian. “But the beauty of the Now Platform is the speed with which we can get things done. Time to market is incredibly fast. Where it might have taken six months to start up a new service, with ServiceNow we’re operational within six weeks. I don’t think digitization ever stops.”

The agility, Christian adds, is helping win converts and gather momentum: “It is easier to convince new users when they see the speed we can move. We can have an idea in testing within a week. The Now Platform means we can reuse and repurpose existing workflows.”

A single home for all service requests
The engagement transforms service expectations throughout the airport. Users can self-serve a range of functions, whether it is ordering new hardware, reporting an issue, or requesting access for new colleagues. Tasks are increasingly automated, and there is a data trail to audit usage and plot trends. Rather than multiple touchpoints and different processes, it establishes a single home for service—with the expectation that new functionality will be added.

Consolidation also improves compliance. Data management is more secure; the airport is aiming to be ISO27001 certified (information security) by late 2021.

“Service shouldn’t be tied to any administrator. The more efficient we become, the more time we free up to engage directly with the passenger,” Christian explains. Having started with the easier service transformations, his team is now working with the business to find and address harder requests. Popular Knowledge Base articles are promoted, and gaps identified.

“We were conscious at the beginning this wasn’t an IT project for IT users. The portal needed to be user-friendly for all users,” Christian explains. “We’ve spent a great deal of time considering the look and feel of the site. It continues to evolve.”

Onboarding high-profile advocates
One of the most important early ‘wins’ was the digitization of the airport’s ID card process. Bringing the previously manual, paper-based process over to the Now Platform has accelerated approval times and helped demonstrate the platform’s power.

“Having the ID card process on the Now Platform is a major statement,” says Christian. “It gives us visibility across our partner ecosystem and ensures one of the fundamental aspects of our operations—security clearance—is managed consistently. It is also much faster.”

With commercial partners often having a high turnover of staff, the airport needs to process 10,000 new or lapsed ID card applications each year.

“Clearly, we need a strong audit trail,” says Pia Verndal, Head of the ID Card Office and Security Support, Copenhagen Airport. “Again, digital, rather than manual, paper-based inputs, is far superior. Forms are more consistent, there are fewer errors – where there are errors, they are easier to trace.” The biggest advantage, Pia adds, is the change in ambition: “We can provide a better service. We can be more proactive with our partners. We can see when ID clearance is due to lapse, and we can then notify our partners in advance. It is easier to spot common problems or delays in the system, and we can then work to rectify them. We can also help our partners remove paper from their processes.”

Towards greater simplification
“We have to be seen by our partners as efficient. This is Scandinavia; we don’t want to ask people to work 16 hours a day when the work could be done in eight,” Christian adds. In what has been a quiet year for international travel, Copenhagen Airport has used the time to finesse the user experience and seek out remaining service processes in need of digitalization.

The project was completed with expert support from Nicholai Christensen, a former IT Service Manager at Copenhagen Airport.

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