Unifying IT service, operations, and enterprise architecture

As a global technology leader, IBM is committed to helping businesses gain a competitive edge. At the heart of this mission is the Chief Information Officer organization (IBM CIO), a global team that leads IBM’s internal IT strategy. More than 270,000 IBMers rely on IBM CIO to deliver best-in-class IT services, which empower them to work smarter and collaborate with customers.

To keep pace, IBM CIO realized that it needed an adaptive IT platform to accelerate service delivery, while serving as an innovation engine for IBM. However, disparate systems, manual processes, and data silos hindered operations. A lack of transparency into applications and their dependencies made it difficult to gauge the impact of incidents on business services and to properly prioritize responses.

After careful consideration, IBM selected ServiceNow as its strategic partner to improve incident resolution times and enhance employee experiences.

Resolving application incidents faster

Relying on strong leadership and agile thinking, IBM has a prudent roadmap for success. With expert guidance from ServiceNow, the team took a phased approach. Rosti Satanovsky, ServiceNow Platform Owner and CoE Leader at IBM explains, “The first thing we wanted to address was service management because there was an array of tools being used: homegrown tools, email, Slack—you name it. We wanted to increase our visibility into incident and change management, which is a challenge in such a huge company.”

IBM made a strategic move to unify IT operations and application management via the ServiceNow AI Platform to reduce reliance on third-party tools, leverage the platform’s integrated Configuration Management Database (CMDB) capabilities, and rationalize applications. Starting with IT Service Management (ITSM), IBM made it easier for agents to spot application problems by separating business-critical incidents from simple interactions and requests using Service Operations Workspace.

John Forrest, Service Management Lead at IBM explains, “Service Operations Workspace has been critical in supporting our help desk’s shift left, by managing interactions before issues become incidents. This has resulted in just 21% of our 11,000 interactions being classified as incidents, and has increased our first call resolution rate to 98.5%. Tier 2 teams can stay focused on complex tasks, such as changes and service requests, all within Service Operations Workspace.

“Within IBM CIO, we're consistently looking for the challenges our users face. With ServiceNow, we easily monitor our applications and can now alert major incident teams within 11 minutes during sensitive periods like quarter-end—something we could not do before.”

Understanding the impacts of change

Building on their success with ITSM, the team added IT Operations Management (ITOM) and leveraged its comprehensive CMDB to inventory the IT environment. With more than 11,000 application changes each month, the team wanted more insight into what was happening within the IT landscape. A single source of truth for assets and services makes it easier to prioritize critical incidents, while automation accelerates the resolution of change-driven incidents.

To manage change, IBM integrated ServiceNow with its internal development pipeline. By bringing all changes into the CMDB, the team easily manages the deployment schedule for changes. After cleaning and archiving CMDB data, IBM has a clearer understanding of true incidents.

In addition, ITOM gives IBM the information they need—everything from monitoring and event management to incident creation and on-call alerts. Automation allows the team to quickly check applications for vulnerabilities, ensure proper documentation, and control the timing for changes based on business impact. IT support teams easily correlate incidents to changes and prioritize events. 

Fabiano Correa Bittencourt, IT Operations Management Lead at IBM recalls, “Our main mission was to replace an incident system, and we did it in the first year. Then, we expanded our platform use and found opportunities to integrate ServiceNow. I am very proud of that.”

Managing applications and compliance

With the foundation in place for the IBM CIO organization, they were ready to manage applications as a portfolio, rolling out Enterprise Architecture (EA) enterprise-wide—a first for the team—in just 52 days.

Accomplishing this enabled IBM to remove dependencies on third-party software and reduce IT spending. They were also able to take advantage of EA integration capabilities to gain a deeper understanding of underlying application dependencies. Utilizing out of the box EA capabilities and CMDB data, they reduced manual entry for application data fields by 75%, resulting in a 35% productivity savings.

To correlate application owners with the company org chart, IBM integrated Workday with ServiceNow. Automated workflows apply 200 application owner updates per month, improving data quality. “What we can see, we can manage; and with ServiceNow, we can see all the applications everybody has across all of IBM,” says Alison Sorbet, Operations Manager at IBM. “When application owners transfer between groups, we notify them to determine if there is a change in ownership as well. That is a huge win.”

With accurate ownership details and identification of abandoned development projects, IBM sunsetted about 20% of their applications. Tight control of the retirement process and ensuring application footprints are completely removed has saved IBM nearly $900,000 monthly.

Additionally, controlled processes are now established for registering new applications in development, moving applications to production, and retiring them. These full lifecycle controls enforce compliance, which is top of mind for the IBM CIO team. “With EA, our application inventory auditors can now easily complete monthly evaluations,” Sorbet says.

Immediate impact on the business

Determined to quickly realize value and ensure the right pieces were in place, IBM also uses ServiceNow Impact to help measure and track their long-term goals. By providing expert guidance and support, Impact helps ensure IBM’s success by aligning IBM CIO’s objectives with ServiceNow’s capabilities. The IBM CIO organization and ServiceNow’s product leaders meet regularly to discuss major projects and identify synergies with upcoming releases, facilitating collaboration and keeping communication flowing between the teams.

Prepared for the future of work

With ServiceNow as their partner, IBM is not just delivering exceptional IT services—they’re changing how work gets done. The IBM CIO team has gained the expertise to help project owners realize their business goals using ServiceNow. "With our proven success in the CIO utilizing ServiceNow, we are attracting projects from all areas of the enterprise,” says Satanovsky. “Our process experts specialize in optimizing operations across systems. We can present tailored solutions and articulate how our connected platform will revolutionize their business operations.”

Esdras Moraes, Director, I&T Operations at IBM concludes, “As organizations continue to embrace AI, our collaboration with ServiceNow to combine watsonx with the ServiceNow AI Platform will empower users to generate more insights from their data—unlocking the full potential of AI for their businesses.”