Banking on growth
With online and phone services widely available, banking customers can do what they need, where and when they need it, without having to make a trip to their local branch. But, with these services expanding, banks have had to become more technologically savvy, creating an amalgamation of systems, products, and workflows, while ensuring that all internal operations are performed cautiously to avoid disruptions to customer service.
First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB), the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates is a prime example of an organization focused on technological improvements. The bank has achieved consistent growth, including through acquisitions in the region, which meant that it was faced with the need to streamline IT operations and enhance user experience.
“The previous platform had reached the end of its shelf life,” says Navid Thakur, VP of Enterprise Tools and Automation at FAB. “We knew that it was time for something new and advanced.”
FAB was actively looking for a scalable and future-proof solution that would support the reduction of P1 cases, eliminate manual work, and build a solid foundation for digital transformation. It landed on ServiceNow.
“When you get your hands on something like ServiceNow and start doing the research, you realize that this is enterprise-level stuff rather than just an IT tool,” says Emma Lewis, Head of Technology Service Management at FAB.
The right solution in any environment
FAB decided to focus on ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM). The process and flow dependencies as well as design-level complexities that needed to be tackled were immense, considering FAB’s complex organizational requirements and the industry it served. But the move to the SaaS platform, and then back to on-premises due to regulatory requirements, was successful and demonstrated how flexible ServiceNow can be within the business.
“All the different modules we’ve activated in ITSM alone—incident, problem, fulfilment, change, knowledge, availability management, configuration management—combined with the maturity we achieved using the CSDM framework, means we have a tool that is able to take the required inputs, which we always wished for, and finally centralize in terms of information and data.”
FAB looked at its end-to-end workflows and focused on automation so that tickets could be assigned directly to the right person. But automation was just the beginning, with the interaction module having a huge impact on the service desk.
“It was a breakthrough in terms of how service desk manages requests and interactions,” comments Navid. By introducing interactions, FAB removed inquiries from the incident pool, saving employees time and effort.
ITSM is actively leveraged to increase speed to deliver and manage incidents, as well as ensure that services are delivered safely. “It’s about enabling the business to deliver new products without problems,” says Emma. “Making sure that they are fully tested for defects through the change management process. And if something goes wrong after delivery, we have a process in place to get issues resolved. We have knowledge in our tool that can help us recognize problems as well as the fix to restore the service quickly.”
Leveraging learning
With ITOM, FAB started with basic functionalities, but data availability is already at 80%, with the right processes in place to ingest it. FAB is also using ServiceNow Impact to assess and understand the potential effect of changes or incidents on its IT infrastructure and services. This helps it in making informed decisions, planning for contingencies, and minimizing disruptions to IT operations.
Impact provided FAB with many useful reports that identified bug fixes, as well as configurations that could be corrected, improved, or enhanced. What’s more, compliance problems are now engineered out in the beginning of each process.
“A lot of noncompliance issues were brought under control when we introduced ServiceNow as, being a bank, we have to go through a strict and sophisticated governance model,” says Navid. “The improvement of our development and testing cycle really delivered value to us from a compliance perspective.”
ServiceNow is also often used to directly address risks. “That’s been an amazing help to us,” comments Emma. “The reduction of incident volumes by creating user interactions for inquiries to the Service Desk now gives us clearer visibility of real issues, leading to significant improvement of our compliance and risk posture.”
Insights and flexibility
For FAB, the main aspect of the Now Platform is insight. The bank has much more visibility into activities happening across all technology and is much more data driven. Reports and dashboards are making it possible to update processes and practices, making everything leaner and bringing on informed cultural and practice changes.
“This is happening because we have data now,” says Navid. “Before, it was always guesswork or trial and error. But now, we can confidently look forward and use data for decision making.”
The maintenance of the platform is also much simpler, with much higher platform availability. This was simply not possible in the past. “The number of users has grown, with all accessing concurrently without any problems,” says Navid. “The performance of the system has been fantastic. I think in the past three years we had only two performance incidents.”
Most importantly, FAB has a clear view of its operational excellence. Based on the data in ServiceNow, a lot of dashboards can be created and used to tell the story of IT service performance and availability to senior management. There is no more need for heavy Excel and PowerPoint. The data is traceable and FAB can harness, use and present respective perspectives.
The dashboards are utilized in ExCo reporting, group technology steering committee reporting, and business management reporting. “We love the dashboard capability,” says Emma. “It looks good and you can adjust it for all different types of audiences.”
Solid foundations for continued growth
The bank is determined to continue automating and making its processes and workflows leaner, enabling users to be more hands-off. It has already built a solid foundation for further digital development and the integration capabilities are providing a new-found flexibility, allowing it to be more innovative.
FAB has a vision of using ServiceNow as the core platform to drive transformation across the organization. This will include the introduction of Hardware Asset Management and expanding into Governance, Risk, and Compliance, as well as Financial Services Operations, Customer Service Management, and Integrated Risk Management among others.
“We’re also excited about AIops,” says Emma. “Although we’re not quite there yet, ServiceNow will be at the heart of our AIops journey.”