The three pillars of digital transformation
NEC, a Japanese multinational information and communications technology provider, is a purpose-driven company. It has a mission to create a sustainable society that works for everyone, built on the values of safety, security, equity, and efficiency. Its Mid-term Management Plan 2025 aims to deliver on these objectives through three pillars of digital transformation: an internal corporate transformation (Internal DX), a core customer transformation (Customer DX), and societal transformation through flagship digital projects (Societal DX).
“Proactively driving customer and societal transformation will help us to achieve our company mission, but to have the biggest impact, we first needed to deepen our understanding of our own corporate transformation,” says Hiroshi Kodama, Corporate Executive Vice President, CIO and CISO at NEC Corp. “We treated our own company as ‘client zero’, using our digitization journey as a learning opportunity so we can pass on our knowledge and experience to customers and society. In this regard, ‘Internal DX’ is an extremely important initiative for NEC.”
Partnering with ServiceNow to launch ‘One NEC System’
NEC defines its key factors for corporate transformation as business strategy, business portfolio, financial strategy, culture, and people.
“When it comes to transformation, it’s important not to overlook your people: nurture their desire for change and support them through the transition,” comments Kodama.
“To raise awareness of our transformation and help employees change the way they work, we came up with the One NEC System concept. The idea was to virtually consolidate and integrate multiple internal systems on one platform.”
To achieve its One NEC System, the company collaborated with numerous industry experts and academics. This led the team to ServiceNow.
“The Now Platform connects disparate systems on one platform and provides a foundation to deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences, which leads to significant productivity gains,” explains Kodama. “It has the right architecture and features to turn the platform concept into a reality. ServiceNow was the perfect partner to help us launch our One NEC System.”
Identifying and prioritizing the biggest pain points
NEC used ServiceNow Inspire Value—a program offering exclusive transformation strategies—to assess its digital maturity. “We were looking for quick wins—pain points that we could prioritize and resolve early in our ServiceNow implementation,” says Makoto Idogawa, Executive Professional, Management Information Systems Department, Corporate IT & Digital Division at NEC. Idogawa is responsible for the company’s ServiceNow Center of Excellence (CoE) and leads initiatives to improve the employee experience.
One common issue impacting employees was that there were more than 500 contact points for internal IT services, making it difficult to know where to go for support.
“IT service teams had their own individual websites and systems for inquiries. As well as taking a long time to find the right website, employees were confused by the different user interfaces and processes,” explains Ryosuke Takeda, Manager, Management Information Systems Department, Corporate IT & Digital Division at NEC, and responsible for the ServiceNow implementation. “We decided to roll out ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) to centralize entry points for inquiries and unify the interface.”
Reducing response times by up to 57%
NEC consolidated 137 of the most-used entry points out of the possible 500 onto ServiceNow ITSM, giving employees a single portal for major inquiries. This eliminated confusion over how to navigate IT support services. Takeda reveals, “We pulled together Knowledge Base articles for each process and service and made them searchable from the portal. That helped more people solve their own problems without needing to raise a ticket, improving the employee experience and reducing workloads for the support team.”
And, thanks to a feature that automatically suggests relevant Knowledge Base articles when an inquiry is submitted, response times have been reduced by up to 57%.
“We handle approximately 20,000 cases per month, and Knowledge Base articles are being viewed around 130,000 times a month,” says Takeda. “That shows the usage rate is increasing—people are getting more comfortable using the portal and Knowledge Base.”
Defining a transformation roadmap with clear targets
At around the same time as the ServiceNow ITSM adoption, NEC introduced ServiceNow HR Service Delivery (HRSD). The company began consolidating its 520 service desks in early 2020, and following the prioritization project the team undertook with ServiceNow Inspire Value, it identified 47 that were handling high volumes of inquiries related to ITSM and HRSD. When these desks were consolidated onto the ServiceNow portal, the first contact response rate—i.e. inquiries that can be answered on the spot—rose from 40% to 88%.
As internal use cases matured, NEC decided to accelerate the strategic collaboration with ServiceNow, and by March 2023, it achieved the goals set out in its three-year business growth plan. NEC is currently developing a roadmap to define how it will use ServiceNow technologies for its corporate transformation. Kodama refers to this as ‘Blueprint’—a roadmap and implementation plan guiding the direction of the transformation.
In addition to enhancing the employee experience, which was identified in the digital maturity assessment, ‘Blueprint’ prioritizes corporate digitization and continuous process improvement, automation and efficiency enhancement of IT security, and streamlining and improving business operations, as the four areas for improvement in efficiency to work towards in NEC’s transformation. Each area has its own targets to achieve by FY2025, and the team created an implementation plan that examines how many people and systems are to be involved in achieving these goals.
A key catalyst for ‘Blueprint’ was ServiceNow Impact, a solution developed to accelerate and maximize the value that companies achieve with ServiceNow. Built on the Now Platform, Impact provides customers with personalized recommendations and expertise to help them achieve the specific outcomes their business needs. With Impact, NEC was able to visualize the business outcomes and value of their ServiceNow implementations, validate their strategy, and put the right governance and structure in place for their digital transformation.
Deepening knowledge of the use of Generative AI with ServiceNow
NEC is gradually expanding its use of ServiceNow as it progresses ‘Blueprint’. “While we have improved the employee experience with IT services and HR portals, developments in other areas are still in progress. The company continues to focus on quick wins to build on its success,” explains Idogawa.
Next, NEC plans to roll out ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) and Security Operations (SecOps). Together, these solutions will automate and improve IT security operations and management processes.
By using the robust ITOM Discovery data in the single Configuration Management Database (CMBD) with SecOps workflows, NEC is building a system to automatically identify vulnerabilities and fix them. Previously, this was handled manually using Excel and emails.
“I have high expectations for the new system. It will greatly improve operational efficiency,” says Takeda.
Kodama is convinced NEC would be able to draw on its Internal DX experience to help other customers. “Lots of companies rely on spreadsheets and manual touchpoints. They’re struggling to use data to transform operations and business management. With our knowledge and experience, we can help to guide them on their transformation journeys.”
The company is also interested in Generative AI. As Kodama explains, “NEC has been advancing our corporate transformation with the aim of maximizing corporate value in terms of business strategy, business portfolio, financial strategy, culture, and people. Through collaboration with ServiceNow, NEC will promote efforts to integrate Generative AI into every aspect of employee digital experiences and drive initiatives for advanced utilization. This will enable us not only to obtain profound expertise in digital transformation but also to create social value. We will continue to help our customers progress towards their transformation goals as well as create a better society. I believe ServiceNow and NEC will achieve this together throughout our further collaboration.”