A standard enterprise architecture
In 2018, NTT Group published its medium-term management strategy called 'Your Value Partner 2025'. This established four strategic pillars: accelerating NTT Group's own digital transformation, supporting customer digital transformation, leveraging people, technology and assets, and enhancing corporate value and shareholder return through ESG initiatives.
Ken Komazawa, Vice President of IT Strategy Office in the Technology Planning Department at NTT Holdings says, "Data has a huge impact on business success. We decided to kick off our digital transformation by creating the right infrastructure and environment to enable us to leverage our data".
Data has become increasingly important as the company's core business has shifted from telephony to Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The Group has been actively investing in new business areas such as energy, healthcare and agricultural technology. It uses data to follow the latest trends in these industries in real-time.
"We have 115 group companies in Japan. To get a single view of group data, each company needed to standardise and optimise their systems in line with our enterprise architecture", explains Mr Komazawa.
With 170,000 employees, taking a centralised approach to systems and data is expected to improve efficiency and create a better user experience, while enabling the Group to make better use of data.
Combining governance and innovation with ServiceNow
NTT Group has accumulated a wealth of knowledge around how to tailor digital transformations to have the biggest impact. It involves combining governance with innovation and having the right digital platform in place to deliver change. After evaluating the solutions on the market, the Group decided to implement ServiceNow to streamline its digital transformation.
"We needed a multi-tenant cloud platform to centralise disparate systems across group companies in Japan and create a standard platform aligned to global standards. ServiceNow was the best fit for our needs", says Tomoaki Matsuo, General Manager, Solutions Consulting in the Enterprise Solutions Division, Enterprise Business Solutions Department of NTT Comware.
Having chosen the platform, NTT Group began analysing processes and workflows to identify common pain points across different companies.
Transforming approval process as the first step
Following this internal review, NTT Group identified 100 areas for improvement. Reforming its approval process with ServiceNow was chosen as the first step of its digital transformation.
Across the Group, 115 companies were operating individual approval systems, each with different input methods and procedures.
"The approvals process was difficult for staff and confusing for people who'd transferred between group companies", recalls Matsuo. "To improve the employee experience (EX), we decided to standardise it".
Most approval systems had been optimised by each company according to individual safety and security standards. There were multiple levels to go through before an approval was granted and the whole process needed to be simplified.
Integrating systems for a single point of entry
The Group built a low-code app using ServiceNow App Engine. This reduced the number of steps involved in approvals while retaining high levels of safety and security. "It's easier to achieve compliance by involving lots of different people in approvals, but it takes much longer. We streamlined the process by consolidating the process into just three steps and including all the right people", says Matsuo.
Another way the Group sped up approvals was by connecting the system to finance, procurement and billing platforms, creating a single point of entry. Previously, when approval was granted for a procurement, employees would need to place an order on the procurement system and go into a separate finance system to make the payment. This was extremely time-consuming and meant employees had to manually enter the same data on each system for every request.
"By connecting all relevant systems, staff only need to input data once. It's more efficient and a better user experience", says Mr Matsuo.
Reducing workloads by 30%
NTT Group introduced its new approval system in 2022, starting by onboarding NTT Holdings. Following the success of this initial implementation, the system was rolled out across the Group in April 2023 and made available on both mobile and desktops.
The finance, procurement and billing systems were revamped before they were linked to the ServiceNow platform. A single input of details will be reflected on all three systems, thereby increasing work efficiency and processing speed of approvals.
By designing a mobile first solution with a single point of entry and simple approval process, the Group aims to reduce manual effort by 30%. Consolidating multiple approval systems onto one system is also expected to reduce development and operational costs by 50%.
Monitoring and observability made simple
NTT Group uses ServiceNow Impact, the industry's first human and AI-powered value acceleration solution, to help accelerate its time to value with ServiceNow. With the platform health tools included in ServiceNow Impact, NTT Group is able to visualise workloads in the cloud and monitor the environment. One of these tools, Instance Observer, pulls telemetry and health analytics into user-friendly dashboards, which allow the Group to quickly respond to performance changes. This solution is one of the key differentiators of ServiceNow and is expected to be highly beneficial to the Group moving forward.
"Although we could monitor the status of resources that were on-site, we lacked visibility of workloads running in the cloud; operating fully on the cloud tends to be 'blackboxing', which means losing track of the work execution process, as if the work is being done inside a black box", Mr Komazawa explains. "Through ServiceNow Impact, Instance Observer helps us share information to find the source of performance or speed issues in real-time. It's been a great help".
"There is no other platform that has a feature similar to Instance Observe, and this would be one of the advantages of ServiceNow that we will leverage as we expand the platform's use in the future", Komazawa adds.
Next on the agenda, NTT Group is planning to further improve employee experience (EX) and provide exceptional customer experience (CX). Mr Komazawa reveals, "In May 2023, we announced the 'New Value Creation and Sustainability 2027 Strategy Powered by IOWN', the new medium-term management strategy. Improving the customer and employee experience are core components of this strategy, and ServiceNow is one the platforms we’ll be utilising to achieve it".