Copenhagen lifts off with IT Service Operations

Transforming Denmark’s busiest airport
Copenhagen Airport is Denmark’s main airport, the busiest in Scandinavia, and consistently rated as one of Europe’s best. It expects to see 22 million passengers in 2022 and is building the capacity to manage 40 million in the coming years.

“The target is still to increase our capacity, but the realisation has obviously been set back due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We need to see things coming fully back to normal in the aviation industry”, says Christian Hjortkjaer, Head of Service Management at Copenhagen Airport.

Copenhagen Airport has been working hard to transform its operations. It wants to streamline processes and make it easier for teams to adopt and integrate digital workflows. From a passenger’s perspective, it wants to smooth the journey “from kerbside to departure gate”, in Christian’s words.

Creating transparency around the role of IT
ServiceNow sits at the heart of Copenhagen’s continued transformation. ServiceNow IT Service Management creates a service home for the airport’s 20,000+ employees and partners. Launched in 2017, the portal enables employees with a Copenhagen Airport ID to self-serve a range of tasks including obtaining parking permits or access cards for the buildings. The Knowledge Base—up to 1,400 articles and counting—guides employees through everyday tasks and challenges.

More importantly, ServiceNow establishes a single platform for different business units within the airport to create their own solutions.

For example, the baggage department built its own solution via ServiceNow to support the registration and handling of incidents connected to a passenger’s baggage. This has created an environment where teams are encouraged to try new ideas and explore the impact of digital workflows.

“We’re laying the foundations”, says Christian. “We now need the transparency to make qualified, factual decisions about digital transformation—and that’s where a single interface for Service Operations is so valuable.”

Connecting IT service management with operations
The strategic focus now is Service Operations. Copenhagen Airport is working hard to connect IT service and IT operations management on a single platform. By adding IT Operations Management Discovery to ITSM, this creates the visibility needed to paint a unified and collaborative picture of the airport’s transformation, whether it’s for IT service agents or operators.

“Discovery immediately improves the quality of data we have to hand”, says Christian. “It allows us to automate the way we update data.”

This real-time data, he continues, keeps the airport’s multiple IT-dependent projects on track. It helps to detect issues and maintain process alignment.

Copenhagen Airport wants to encourage its business units to explore new digital workflows, but it must maintain process discipline. Discovery monitors exactly what IT infrastructure solutions are being used, including virtual machines, servers, storage, databases and applications.

“If someone has created a server outside of our process then Discovery tells us about it”, says Christian. “We can then encourage users to follow the agreed workflow, with all the advantages of support and performance assurance.”

Enabling IT to be a partner to the business
The value of Discovery, according to Christian, should not just be judged by the improved MTTR (mean time to repair) or outage reductions, but by the certainty of Service Operations management. With multiple projects taking place simultaneously, Copenhagen Airport is confident its IT is running smoothly and efficiently. Christian and the team have a firmer grip on lifecycle management, there is a clear map of dependencies, and Copenhagen Airport can be more confident in its business resilience. Rather than local lists of inventories, there is a single source of truth.

“Ultimately, the business doesn’t care about servers or databases. They are interested in whether the application is working”, he says. “Service Operations enables IT to have a qualified discussion with the business. We have greater transparency, clearer insights and a better ability to communicate with stakeholders in terms of the impact and risk it may entail for the business.”

Greater certainty underpins better decisions
Passenger numbers may not have risen over the past three years, but investment in IT at Copenhagen Airport has grown substantially. The IT team has grown from 85 to 145 employees, says Christian, with many of the roles created to help partner with the business. IT teams work with the application owner to confirm change requests, availability and support.

“We now have IT people to work alongside the business, to enable the changes the airport wants to make”, Christian explains. “Having a seamless link between IT service and IT operations provides certainty in the outcomes. We can also make better use of what we already have in place.”

This certainty, he adds, translates to greater business agility: “Rather than three meetings, we can reach a conclusion in one. We have everything we need on one platform.”

The next step is to extend ITOM Discovery to service mapping for all applications. Currently, 34 applications are mapped. Christian is assessing which are the most critical and expects 100 applications to be mapped shortly, adding, “The goal is to have as much critical information as possible in one place. One view or workspace where everything is visible.”

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