Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 40 | Page 61

CASE STUDY “Our existing ITSM platform required an update towards aligning with the latest technologies in this area to boost functionality and efficiency,” said Hamed AlAwadhi, Vice President – ICT, DSOA. “Core to our organisation’s mission and vision is the need for adoption of industry leading business processes, increasing efficiencies, and fostering greater employee happiness. So, as we looked to align our technology with our business growth strategy, we realised that we needed to start by providing higher levels of automation and mobility within our IT service delivery.” Comprehensive and flexible service platform After an exhaustive review of their options, which included benchmarking ITSM solutions at other semi-government organisations in the UAE, AlAwadhi and his team settled on ServiceNow. Working with Fujitsu, one of ServiceNow’s key partners in the Middle East, the DSOA ICT team deployed just about every module within the ITSM platform. Key modules included: • Incident Management • Problem Management • Change Management and Release Management • Asset and Cost Management • Request Management • Configuration Management (CMDB) www.intelligentcio.com ARGUABLY THE BIGGEST BENEFIT HAS BEEN A SIGNIFICANT REDUCTION IN TOTAL TRANSACTION COST. • Knowledge Management • Reports and Dashboards • Service Level Agreements Platform flexibility Explaining why DSOA selected ServiceNow, AlAwadhi said: “One of the key factors that set ServiceNow apart from the competition is flexibility of the platform. With ServiceNow, we can easily configure modules to ensure that the workflows, controls, SLAs, and KPIs are tailor-made for our business needs. “In fact, I would say that 90% of the functionality was designed by our in-house team. At the same time, tomorrow, if those needs change, reconfiguration is just as easy. An added advantage is that all this customisation is done on a development layer above the core, so making these changes does not affect our upgrade cycle.” Reducing time to resolution with ServiceNow providing the critical interface between DSOA’s IT team and all internal users, arguably the biggest benefit has been a significant reduction in total transaction cost. “Prior to ServiceNow, when a ticket was raised for any issue, be it a request for a new laptop or inquiry regarding disruption of an IT service, it would always get routed to certain pre-defined IT stakeholders,” said AlAwadhi. “The stakeholder would then need to assess the request before deciding whether it was something that was actually within his/ her remit or if it needed to be routed to another employee. Similarly, all follow-ups were either managed via email, over the telephone, or in person. As such the process was extremely inefficient, lengthy, and could potentially impact organisation performance. “With ServiceNow, prior to even raising a ticket, the user can first refer to the most up-to-date and relevant content in the Knowledge Management module to get answers to the query. If he/she still feels the need to raise a ticket, depending on the nature of the request, it immediately gets routed to the right stakeholder for the INTELLIGENTCIO 61