A digital transformation pioneer

For over 20 years, Saudi Telecom Company (stc) has driven digital transformation in its region, supporting digitization and offering advanced solutions in voice, data, cloud, access, and connectivity services. It is now one of the main telco operators in Saudi Arabia with 13 subsidiaries across many countries.  

Always looking for the best solutions to improve its operations, stc turned to ServiceNow’s AI platform for business transformation to create a consolidated hub for internal IT and telco services with the aim of shortening delivery times and improving the governance of processes and approvals.

Abandoning spreadsheets

stc’s mission is to be an industry leader and enable society and the economy to thrive. It strives to achieve this by remaining firmly customer centric which, importantly, includes company employees. After all, the better supported its employees are, the better stc can serve 170 million people in the region. stc made the decision to start small with its new consolidated hub. “At first, we utilized ServiceNow on a small scale, offering 11 services,” explains Abdulaziz I. Alnazhah, Multi & IT Cloud Section Manager at stc. 

“But over time, our leadership observed the untapped potential still available on the platform, including the automation capabilities, and we are now reaching around 100 services on the platform.”

Where teams used to rely on spreadsheets and emails for tracking and maintaining data, they now have a single platform for all processes, speeding up delivery time and maintaining top-notch governance of approvals from multiple stakeholders. 

New powerful processes

A small IT cloud project provided the foundation and an understanding of what’s possible. Now, stc uses ServiceNow to serve thousands of employees through its ‘Technology Portal’, the company’s name for the ServiceNow AI platform for business transformation, which has been a game-changer in service delivery.

“This is one of the major things for us and we see its benefits in our daily work,” comments Abdulaziz. “We also see the impact on our customers. They are very happy about the automation and the transformation in terms of the speed and the quality of services.” 

For example, ServiceNow is transforming demand management through automation, processing over 3,000 requests in the few months since it was implemented and eliminating stc’s reliance on spreadsheets. The whole team has access to the same set of data in a single, task-based architecture, speeding up and simplifying work, and preventing bottlenecks. And this doesn’t just solve larger organizational problems but also smaller, daily work challenges.

“Employees who used to process this data don’t have to struggle anymore when someone is on leave or is unavailable,” says Abdulaziz. “The demand services have contributed to a really big change in stc.” 

Collaborating with experts

Abdulaziz and his team are also taking full advantage of ServiceNow Impact. Impact combines predictive software with human ingenuity to help customers adopt ServiceNow solutions quickly, optimize platform health, amplify expertise, and realize value faster.

stc and ServiceNow experts worked closely to review development choices and best practices, ultimately identifying areas to improve the company’s infrastructure and prepare them for the future. “Our first recommendation from ServiceNow Impact suggested running a health scan to see where we were in terms of platform security and overall health,” says Abdulaziz. “And, though we were surprised by the findings, we worked with our squad to fix all the issues.”

ServiceNow Impact also helped the team upgrade the platform and the infrastructure, which is hosted on premises.

“ServiceNow Impact helped us align our existing and future demand so that we could better utilize our investment,” says Jubran S. Alshahrani, Cloud Services & Tools Director. “I believe this is a starting point for a larger transformation inside the stc technology unit.” 

Immediate time savings

While it’s still early to quantify the results, the provisioning of IT resources for the cloud makes it clear how much automation is affecting both sides of the equation.

“We can now provision services and IT resources between 30 minutes and four hours, depending on the type of service requested,” says Abdulaziz. “It used to take four to 10 days.”

These requests used to be managed manually with a different person handling each step of the process, from the request, through approval and getting the server provisioned all the way to sending the access information by email to the end user.

“An employee would do a small task and hand it over to the next person to do another task. Now, the entire process is automated in ServiceNow and the underlying integrated platforms. It’s well-designed and enables us to serve our customers better.” 

Forging the right path for others

There are around 100 services available on the platform, but the team is onboarding more every month, and the success of the portal is clearly visible to other groups within stc. In fact, its impact is so profound that Abdulaziz started receiving queries from other departments, requesting his team to host and automate their own services.

“They all want to join this wonderful portal because once they saw how beautiful it is, they wanted to be a part of it,” comments Anwar I. Alsubhi, Cloud Services General Manager. “We’re very happy to onboard their services and contribute in uplifting stc’s automation capabilities. And we’re delighted to have this partnership with the ServiceNow team who have made a great contribution for us to reach this level of success.”

Happy employees

Employee satisfaction has gone up significantly at stc. Abdulaziz believes that, often, people are so busy with their responsibilities that they don’t consider how their work is affecting others. But employee surveys, deployed through the Technology Portal, gave his team a chance to see some feedback.

“Reviewing data from these surveys provides valuable insights into the positive impact our work has on others. We achieved a score of 4.5 on a five-point scale, indicating a strong initial performance.

Reliable data all in one place

Another big area affected by ServiceNow is the IT data. Before, the company was faced with fragmented information and unreliable mapping of ownership, as data was kept in various places and managed by different people.

Now, all the information and data pertaining to systems, servers, and owners is kept in the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB). It’s become one of the major information sources inside stc, allowing for better monitoring of IT assets. In fact, the company onboarded everything to the Technology Portal, including hundreds of applications and over 12,000 servers.

“Data was a challenge,” explains Abdulaziz. “Many assets were decommissioned or brought in and created and no one knew about it. Owners changed and ownership was not mapped. But when ServiceNow came into the picture, it helped us to identify these gaps and enhance our asset tracking.”

A partnership for the future

Planning for the future, stc is also using ServiceNow Impact to train its team members to become certified ServiceNow developers. The company will now be able to fulfill its internal demand for automating services further and managing the platform itself. ServiceNow Impact also helps Abdulaziz stay informed about additional innovations and updates that stc can adopt in the future. That’s how Abdulaziz found out about Performance Analytics, which he’s currently implementing, in addition to the upcoming support for the Arabic language.

“Without ServiceNow Impact, I wouldn’t even know that Arabic was an option. They keep me informed and up to date with the latest features that would help solve our challenges; this is the essence of a true partnership. It hasn’t been long, but the way they lead is beautiful.”