Technology powers a new era for ice hockey

The National Hockey League (NHL) is the pinnacle of professional ice hockey. The sport’s combination of speed, skill, and physicality makes for a thrilling live experience both in the arena and through the NHL’s broadcasting and live streaming services.

Technology is revolutionizing the way ice hockey is played, coached, and experienced, and the NHL is also embracing technology to deliver organizational efficiency at the same elite level as the sport itself. John Stein, the NHL’s Senior Director, Digital Transformation, explains: “With the vision we have and the experiences we want to create, the NHL is reshaping the way we are entertained by sports.”

Curating unique experiences for stakeholders

The ServiceNow AI Platform for business transformation is enabling the NHL to help connect and integrate systems and remove technical silos with a single, unified platform experience. This automates manual processes and transforms how the NHL manages operations, supports its people, and enhances communications.

Consolidating these legacy systems improves operational performance and unlocks time and cost savings. As a result, the NHL’s 800+ employees have more time to focus on providing memorable experiences. Working with ServiceNow Impact and Expert Services, the NHL created three custom portals, built on the ServiceNow platform, to manage aspects of employee, club, and partner experiences.

Streamlining communications with clubs

First is the NHL Club Portal, the main communication channel between the league and clubs.

“ServiceNow’s Expert Services team helped us develop one easy-to-use platform in just a few weeks, with secure point of entry, individually branded for each club,” explains Rachel Sachs, Senior IT Project Manager. “They access a standardized set of processes to share information quickly and efficiently, supported by knowledge articles and videos.”

One workflow transformed by the Club Portal is the processing of advertising requests for the NHL’s digital platforms. Each season, around 3,000 requests are submitted. These were historically handled using manual processes through email and traditional spreadsheets, leading to inevitable data errors and delays.

With Customer Service Management, the NHL can ensure a consistent and complete intake of campaign data and material. Each request is automatically tracked and communicated, with clear responsibilities for fulfillment at every step. Requests are processed faster, freeing up time to devote to higher-value tasks.

Another process transformed by ServiceNow is the collection of standardized information from clubs by the NHL.

“By introducing a common platform and rules, clubs supply information in a standardized format,” explains Rachel. “The time for the NHL to process the information received was cut in half. Multiply this across 32 clubs and the cumulative time-saving is huge. Each interaction’s history is captured too, providing clarity on the status and next steps.”

As part of the planning process for the portal, the NHL leveraged ServiceNow Expert Services to turn the roadmap into action. “The ServiceNow Expert Services team has been so creative in building our understanding of user requirements to help us achieve our goals,” continues Rachel.

Taking employees on the journey

Building on the Club Portal’s success, the NHL wanted to upgrade the employee experience. The league was already using IT Service Management to provide employee technical support but saw the potential of an enterprise service model that included HR services. With an integrated portal, HR managers now have visibility of all HR requests and are using dashboards to manage service quality and ensure fast resolution.

“Our vision is to provide self-service capabilities for everyone,” explains Karen Atkinson, VP of Program Management, Technology, and Operations. “Just as we bring the game to life for fans, we adopted the same approach for our employees, to support them and share all the wonderful things the NHL does. The way forward was to create a ‘one-start shop’ for employees, so we worked with our Impact squad and opened the ServiceNow toolbox. My Home Ice is the result.”

Using ServiceNow Employee Center Pro, My Home Ice provides one easy-to-use hub for NHL employees to interact with the business and access information and support. My Home Ice features an intuitive home page and search function, and with a single click provides streamlined support to employees. A unified portal also keeps employees up to date with NHL news and features, upcoming events, critical announcements, and engaging content.

Karen and her team took time to ensure that moving to a single-employee portal was managed sensitively. Colleagues from HR, IT, and creative teams were involved from the outset to capture requirements and share concepts during rounds of user acceptance testing.

“In a recent survey, 87% of employees said My Home Ice is easy to use and makes the organization more productive, and 77% said they can answer their IT and HR questions more easily,” explains John. “Teams are already coming to us to find out how they can get their process onto My Home Ice.

“Our approach is to start small and scale fast. Sport is a competitive and dynamic world, so we focus on how to constantly evolve, curate, and improve the experiences we provide. The processes we are improving using the ServiceNow AI Platform are helping us to learn faster, work faster, work smarter, and work better with less.”

Platform mindset creates endless opportunities

The success of the Club Portal and My Home Ice provided the template to equip the NHL’s extended partner network with technology for requests and communications.

The first use case on the new NHL Partner Portal, built in ServiceNow Customer Service Management Pro, is to streamline licensing, where partners request approval to use the NHL logo and other brand assets.

The previously time-consuming and complex process involved multiple legacy systems. Now, all parties work in the same space, with requests submitted in clear, standardized formats and shared with each team, while the status, progress, and next actions are recorded and visible to all.

“ServiceNow shows us that digital transformation is not just about IT,” explains John. “It’s about adopting a platform mindset. ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box features enable us to simplify the complex, find solutions organically, and scale at speed. These portals are great examples of how ServiceNow helps us constantly iterate, improve, and bring our vision to reality.”

John is even more excited about what’s next. “The mobile experience for game day operations will expand, while we continue to focus on processes that include AI functionality with ServiceNow AI Agents. We’re already seeing fantastic AI development in the Creator space, so we are energized about the limitless opportunities we have with AI moving forward.

“At the end of the day, when I sit down to watch a game, I know everything’s taken care of because I can see it in real time. That’s what really excites me.”

_{NHL and the NHL Shield are registered trademarks of the National Hockey League. © 2025 NHL. All Rights Reserved}