Shifting into high gear

Autostrade Per L’Italia manages more than 3,000 kilometers of roadways, 4,200 bridges and viaducts, and 420 kilometers of tunnels across Italy, enabling fast transit for more than four million people daily. The company manages about half of all tollways in the nation and deploys thousands of cameras, variable message signs, telematic systems and exhaust fans in tunnels to aid traffic flow and public safety.

Aiming to become a European-level integrated mobility operator, Autostrade Per L’Italia committed to transformation initiatives to improve experience, increase automation, and strengthen infrastructure management and security. IT began migrating IT operations and service management functions to the cloud to more easily tap into continued technology advances, lower costs, and achieve greater flexibility in delivering services. Stefano Ricciardi, responsible for IT asset monitoring and infrastructure, led the transition.

With the ability to actively manage IT assets, the organization gains more timely and accurate control of the technology that runs the business and monitors motorways, including applications, databases, software, web servers, and physical and virtual servers. Knowing that a migration would be significant, Ricciardi considered his options. Already using the Now Platform in the cloud for business transformation including HR services, IT project planning, and risk management, Ricciardi chose to standardize on the environment to further cut costs and improve efficiency. 

Driving operations management changes

Until recently, Autostrade Per L’Italia managed toll payment, road conditions, and all other services exclusively in its Florence and Calenzano data centers for a large Italian motorway network. The company had an established on-premises solution for service management and IT event monitoring. A review of this environment—conducted when Autostrade Per L’Italia needed to evolve these technologies to the cloud—prompted the switch to the Now Platform and the shutdown of a dozen legacy servers.

The move to the cloud and consolidating applications on the ServiceNow platform made it easier to integrate with other platforms and reduced the number of vendors to manage. “The fact that ServiceNow is a market leader with ITOM and ITSM, and they continue to look to the future with more GenAI-enabled capabilities, added to our confidence in retiring our legacy solution,” says Ricciardi.

The company implemented Discovery, Service Mapping, Event Management and Service Operations Workspace with event monitoring capabilities for visualizing event impacts through about 1,000 service maps. Autostrade Per L’Italia intends to deploy impact maps that describe relationships between configuration items of all applications. AIOPs and observability are also on the near-term roadmap.

Built-in intelligence and support for a unified data model in the Now Platform helps the organization automate discovery to reduce the risk of losing track of assets—which can be a significant concern with applications deployed on various clouds. Automation of configuration item relationships—the service model description—reduces an otherwise expensive manual activity. CMDB manages configuration items and relationships for these assets, while the assets are inventoried in another system.

Accelerating configuration management

Ricciardi’s team has already integrated network products on AWS and some on-premises data center management products with the CMDB. Discovery runs in the development environment and will expand to other areas. “Already this year we should be able to automatically load and populate our CMDB, and we are setting up the automatic creation of service templates reflecting the relationship between configuration items,” says Ricciardi.

ServiceNow Expert Services guided the implementation of service models and integrations for populating the CMDB. The group also helps Autostrade Per L’Italia monitor all applications deployed in multiple environments, clouds, and platforms outside the corporate perimeter. “The intelligent, unified Now Platform gives us visibility and control of everything deployed in our diverse environment,” says Ricciardi.

Ricciardi worked with Expert Services to create simpler processes for less disruptive software updates. Moving to the cloud reduced responsibility for server and operating system patching and updates that, together with application updates, had required multiple maintenance interventions each year. Ricciardi conducted an in-depth internal review of the change management process and implemented the release process for the first time in ITSM. “The Now Platform helps us streamline business processes including change management and release management that have a big impact on Autostrade Per L’Italia,” says Ricciardi.

Merging service operations

As part of the Now Platform, IT Operations Management and IT Service Management were deployed as a part of a unified connected service operation strategy. A modern portal provides an improved front end and streamlined IT service catalog for all employees, measurably increasing resolution speed.  Well-established processes such as incident management were quickly recreated in ITSM. 

Autostrade Per L’Italia measures application outages and calculates service levels for all applications with the Now Platform. Malfunctions trigger alarms that come into the environment, highlighting anomalous situations through Service Operations Workspace. In this well-defined environment, agents and operators have a full view into operations and service.

Agents and operators can easily manage an event, correlate service issues and events, and see the impact on the map. They can connect to the knowledge base and event guide, which instructs the service desk on what to do for each alarm. This information—currently in spreadsheets—will be added to the knowledgebase for better searchability by Service Operations Workspace operators and agents.

Motoring into the Future

Massive transformations continue at Autostrade Per L’Italia as the company positions for a leadership role in sustainable, safe, and efficient mobility. In IT, automation and innovation with an eye towards strategic uses of generative AI will continue to improve employee experience, resolution time, system reliability, and keep cars and trucks moving down the road.