DNB improves operational efficiency

Norway’s largest financial services group
DNB offers loans, savings, advisory services, insurance, and pension products for both B2B and B2C customers in the Nordic region. It is Norway’s largest financial services group and serves millions of retail customers and more than 200,000 corporate clients from its 61 branches.

To maintain its competitive advantage, the group is undergoing a digital transformation to help it adapt quickly to meet changing business and customer needs and improve operational efficiency.

Improving service management
In 2016, DNB’s legacy IT service management solution was reaching end of support. “The incumbent solution was highly customized, which limited our ability to upgrade and roll out new features to help our staff be as efficient and productive as possible,” explains Kathrine Wansvik, Product Owner of ServiceNow at the banking group.

The team went to market to find a new solution to help it deliver better IT services to users. ServiceNow IT Service Management is not only a world-leading cloud solution according to the Gartner Magic Quadrant, it also has a rich knowledge base to empower staff to self-serve for basic issues and free up the service desk.

Improving visibility, being more proactive
Following a six-month implementation, the team rolled out an internal ServiceNow portal to streamline incident management and change requests, and to handle the service catalog from a central login. Today the solution handles between 10,000 - 15,000 incidents and 2,000 change requests per month, freeing people up to focus on more valuable and satisfying tasks, delivering more IT to DNB and quicker and better problem solving without expanding the team.

“We wanted to be more proactive and get better visibility of the business, so we created a ‘state of awareness’ framework in ServiceNow. Now we can see the status and stability of services, track service providers, domains, projects, and IT operations from a single dashboard,” comments Kathrine.

This overview of the ‘state of awareness’ helps to identify and mitigate risks before they impact the user experience, and to plan for changes, such as rolling out more DevOps automation and optimizing cloud infrastructure and platform services, at the best time to cause minimal disruption to the business.

Enhancing monitoring and event management
To further enhance operations and improve mean time to recovery, the company rolled out ServiceNow IT Operations Management for service and event mapping. ITOM’s Discovery feature enabled the team to create and populate a CMDB to get better visibility of its environment and manage ownership to reduce complexity and help people find the right stakeholder to address each issue.

DNB also built an app using Now Platform Creator Workflows, owing to App Engine’s low code, to speed up approving requests via a user-friendly interface that replaces a manual approvals process that users found slow and frustrating.

But custom apps don’t just help users to be more efficient; during COVID-19, the company’s annual art auction went digital so employees could bid on artwork via an app – built in just 70 hours – instead of in person. “Engagement was great, and it was good for morale to keep the auction going remotely,” adds Kathrine. “It can be hard to feel connected when we’re all working from home, but the auction was a little piece of DNB culture we could preserve.”

ITOM and ITSM are part of the bank’s platform approach to innovation, and the team has also recently implemented ServiceNow Asset Management to improve software lifecycle management and unlock greater visibility of assets throughout the lifecycle. From a central dashboard, the team will be able to monitor and manage licensing to true-up software rights and ensure it’s not over-spending or at risk of being out of compliance. This has the potential to make significant cost savings by reusing licenses when staff move on and by mitigating compliance penalties.

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