Case Study

www.servicenow.com

Centrica is the biggest energy supplier in the UK, with significant resources in the North Sea and around the world. We source energy, generate it, process it, trade it and store it in the biggest storage facility in the North Sea. We supply energy to millions of customers in homes and businesses. We even go around and fix people’s boilers and their electricity and heating. And, we focus a lot on energy savings and renewable energy sources.

All of these functions represent diverse business units with very different priorities and operating models. As a shared service, we in Information Services (IS) have to cater to all of them, whether they run like a bank, with all the expectations of quality and the timing that a bank would have, or like a call center, with several thousand agents taking calls from customers every day. We have to meet that broad range of service requirements.

Centrica IS serves about 35,000 end users, 2,500 IS users, and 350 resolver groups. We see about 30,000 incidents a month – of which 20,000 are auto-alerts – 1,000 changes a month, and 3,000 IS requests from end-users. We also have 40 external suppliers working at the heart of Centrica IS. They’re not peripheral; they are supplying strategic services to us, so it’s important that our ticketing system coexist with theirs.

Centrica is a federated ITIL organization, which means that we have pockets of IS developing applications within the business units. These pockets tie into shared services in the middle, which provides the ITIL process framework and the Service-now.com toolset that is adopted across all the federated IS teams. We’ve been fortunate to have a strong ITIL culture in Centrica for a few years, so we spend most of our time improving processes instead of educating users on the difference between an incident and a problem.

What to fix first?When we started this project, we already had a functionally rich, well-integrated service management tool that all the business units and all the IS teams used; however, it was due to go out of support at the end of 2010 and parts of it were already unsupported.

We also needed new functionality that we weren’t in a position to add. We had customized the tool to our environment so extensively that we weren’t able to upgrade it.

We had significant performance issues with the tool. It took about 15 minutes to log on in the morning, and a couple thousand people times 15 minutes adds up to a lot of wasted time. Worse yet, the logon delay led to people never wanting to log off, so the concurrent licenses stayed tied up and some people could simply never get access to the tool.

By the time we started the project, our reputation in IS was really suffering because we just couldn’t respond to the need for change and improved functionality. I think people saw us as a blocker rather than as an enabler.

“Lift and Shift,” Even with Obstacles

Making Waves

Information Services team faces 18 integrations to CMDB yet successfully implements big bang.

Organization

Centrica plc

Business

Utility & Energy

Headquarters

Berkshire, UK

Geographies

Worldwide

Modern ITSM Software

CMDBChange managementIncident managementProblemWork request managementContinual service improvementProject and portfolio managementSelf-serviceService catalogService reporting

“The real test was Monday morning, when we usually see a 30% hike in service desk volume, and even then we had no issues – literally we had no issues.”

This Service-now.com case study is based on a presentation by Peter Simmons, Program Manager for ITSM Toolset - Global Deployment at Centrica plc.

 

Case Study

The tool managed several internal ITIL processes, each with some degree of integration to others. Then we had technical integrations to other products: SAP for personal data; Interlink driven off the configuration management database (CMDB) for service visualization; Tivoli for scheduling, business process and housekeeping; BMC, to raise tickets if anything happened on the service. Externally, we had third parties using the system all over the world or integrating their ticketing systems to ours.

With all of these issues facing us, we worried about implementing a new tool while mitigating risk.

ITIL project scopeWe ended up with a “lift and shift” of some of those core elements from our previous system into Service-now.com, plus some new functions.

We lifted and shifted configuration management – a CMDB with a half-million configuration items (CIs) – change management, incident management, service level management, problem management and work request management or manual service requests. We replaced 18 different integrations into the CMDB.

Then we added in several new processes:

• Continual service improvement – We beefed up the rudimentary service improvement function from our previous tool and added a lot of automation.

• Project and portfolio management

• Self-service – We hadn’t intended to offer self-service, but it works so well straight out of the box that we decided to do it and see what would happen.

• Service catalog – As part of the self-service portal, we offered an Amazon.com-type of end- user catalog.

• Service reporting

Of course, there was a lot of ancillary activity: about 30 process workshops to refine requirements, lots of training around the world, functional UAT and systems testing.

Circumstances dictated that we implement all at once, but we decided to go live in two phases. The first was core ITIL, so all the core ITIL processes for IS users went live on August 1, then we ran a pilot for the self-service service catalog for a couple weeks after that, and finally we went live at the end of August with what we called My IS, the self-service portal in the service catalog. It was a congested time, but August is a brilliant month in which to go live on something like this because nobody’s there to tell you that it’s no good. By the time they come back from holiday, it’s fixed.

Project obstaclesWe had several organizational hurdles to jump during implementation:

• Support for SaaS – Especially in IS, the mindset is that “we can do this better than anybody else,” so SaaS was a big leap of faith for the organization. Centrica had a few business applications running as SaaS but no IS applications, so we had to convince people of our direction.

• Support for working with an emerging supplier – This is a big issue for an organization as conservative as Centrica; don’t underestimate it if your company is like ours. We made a choice like this before, then suddenly discovered that we didn’t have a supplier a year later. So we put access agreements into the contract to give our stakeholders some peace of mind.

• Big bang – If we changed incrementally, it would require thousands of people to use different tools for different services – like one for change and another for incident – which we knew would be unpopular. So we decided that big bang was the only approach that would work for Centrica.

“We needed new functionality we weren’t in a position to add and we had customized the tool to our environment so extensively that it was extremely difficult to upgrade it.”

“Lift and Shift,” Even with Obstacles

Case Study

• Scope-creep – It’s very easy to get carried away with this tool, and once our managers saw how little work it takes to customize Service-now.com, they started down their wishlist and we had scope-creep like crazy. We had to ring-fence the Service-now.com people when they came in.

• Agile vs. waterfall – Ordinarily, we at Centrica take a waterfall approach to development, starting with a high-level design, then a detailed design, then approvals, then we start building. With Service-now.com, we took a much more agile approach to delivery. We got the basic requirements from our stakeholders, built the application, showed it to them built, went back a week later for their feedback, and incorporated it. Then we performed a lot of stress testing, system testing and training, then finally went live.

• Service desk transition – In the middle of this, we also changed the company that staffs our service desk offshore. With Service-now.com we automated much of the service desk and fulfillment workload. It was a tremendous advantage for us, but it resulted in much less revenue for the service desk provider.

• Building the future in the shadow of the past – Some of us wanted to be very pragmatic and not change things because there is already enough to deal with. Others of us wanted to improve things, but every time you make something better, you then have to sell/explain/implement/train the change. It’s a tricky trade-off.

• 20,000 open tickets not migrated – We told people that we were not going to migrate legacy tickets because it was

too much work, and that, if they wanted them, they could close them in the old system. We took a lot of flak for that, but we simply refused to move them. As it has turned out, of course, we’ve reached the other side and nobody has asked about those tickets.

We also had technical obstacles to going with Service-now.com:

• U.S. base – Service-now.com’s principal operations people are in the U.S., which created a problem in the areas where we didn’t adopt their SaaS model straight out of the box.

• Experienced third-party developers in the UK – Service-now.com is putting operations people in the UK, and there are developers with Service-now.com experience, but it’s easy to find talent for many of the other ITSM products.

• Browser performance – Many people in Centrica still don’t recognize that the browser is becoming one of the most important applications on the desktop, which is part of the reason we’re still on Internet Explorer 6. Service-now.com doesn’t look very good in that version, so our development team preferred to develop and test on Firefox, but I forbade that because it’s not what the users see. And that problem led me to try to convince IS to upgrade, if only to IE7.

• Point-to-point integrations among legacy systems – The integrations themselves went well, but we had problems with the user data. Six weeks from implementation, we suddenly realized that the clean people-data we received were not as clean as we’d expected. We had to ask users to test their login to ensure that their identity access management data matched their Active Directory entries.

“Once our managers saw how little work it takes to customize Servicenow+, they started down their wish list and we had scope-creep like crazy.”

“Lift and Shift,” Even with Obstacles

Case Study

Go-live was “anticlimactic”With Service-now.com’s SaaS model, we don’t need to buy, store or maintain any infrastructure at all, and that’s a great relief. Too often, you’re ready to go with the application and you’re sitting there waiting for somebody to deliver or build a new server for you. Service-now.com and its partners did an incredible job; within a week of signing the contract, they had all of our instances running in a datacenter in the UK, ready for us to use. It’s our instance – we don’t share it with anybody else – and that’s a huge advantage for us.

We fed them our requirements for anticipated capacity and number of users. They subcontracted the development of the instance to a local partner and we at Centrica managed the program.

Strangely, the week before we went live everything went quiet. We were all accustomed to scrambling around until two o’clock in the morning all week before an implementation, but things didn’t go that way this time. We started releasing over the weekend and watched things get going all day Sunday. The real test was Monday morning, when we usually see a 30% hike in service desk volume, and even then we had no issues – literally we had no issues.

Service was stable and fully available, and all overnight data feeds and integrations worked as expected. We had no reports of performance issues. A total of 3,000 tickets of all types had been raised during the day, including a couple thousand incidents and 250 auto-alerts. The volume of low-priority, triaged issues went up, then went down, and stayed at a workable level. It was a bit of an anticlimax, really.

We have a couple of new sections on our main service portal, My IS. First, we’ve made it very easy to send us feedback. Our old tool had this function, but it was buried, so I decided to go in the opposite direction. People were afraid of the volume of feedback we’d receive, and we

have indeed received loads of it, but “IS Feedback” has been an important step in getting closer to our customers. Our other innovation is called “My Delegates,” in which you can designate somebody to make decisions and send approvals in your absence. Too many requests are delayed by a manager’s absence, and this feature helps break those logjams.

BenefitsWe’ve realized a lot of benefits from moving to Service-now.com:

• Huge performance improvements – The catalog saved us 400 person-hours in the first months by automating about 50% of our fulfillment rate. We expect to save at least 300 more hours when we automate fulfillment among parallel groups. In general, anybody in IS who worked on the old tool will tell you that performance has improved across the board.

• Automation of change task assignment – When you indicate that you’re changing a service, you no longer need to go in and manually raise every single task off that. When you have a thousand changes a month and you save 30% on a change, that’s a lot of time. Also, people are less reluctant to raise a change when they can avoid manually raising the tasks.

• Fewer calls to the helpdesk – Our self-service portal has reduced the number of calls. Mind you, it increased the number of contacts, but those represent callbacks when the desk was ready to talk to the users. Self-service is a big area of improvement and young people in the company are adopting it especially briskly. Also, My Requests lets users check status themselves, so we’re seeing a 50% drop in those phone calls.

• Easier on-boarding of new suppliers – With Web access to the tool, we don’t need to worry about deploying to different environments for

“Lift and Shift,” Even with Obstacles

“With ServiceNow’s SaaS model, we don’t need to buy, store or maintain any infrastructure at all, and that’s a great relief.”

Case Study

www.servicenow.com

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our suppliers. We just set up an account for them and they can log in over the Web. Managers can approve requests straight from their handheld devices.

• Reduced time to fulfill requests – By automating our service request process, we started meeting our SLAs for the first time in years. We’re getting closer to the model everybody is used to at dell.com, in which they order a computer and receive it 2-3 days later.

• Domain segregation – A couple of Centrica’s business units use other ITSM tools, and domain segregation lets us share with them. We’ve set up rules to allow certain information to pass back and forth while keeping all the other information segregated.

• Steady stream of updates – We can create different experiences and services to different business users. Service-now.com pushes three releases a year with new features to try. Everything is already paid for, so I’m glad we don’t have to find money for each new upgrade.

Next stepsWe’ve begun work on an integration to our identity access management (IM) system to deliver LAN, privileged LAN, and message directory accounts without involving people. The request will go through our Oracle system and IM and end up as a LAN account automatically within 45 minutes.

We’re doing a lot of work on a technical service catalog, so that project managers can review the things they need in the same way that an end-user sees and needs them.

We’re getting all carried away again with next steps because of the flexibility of Service-now.com. When I submitted a presentation about our project to itSMF, they wrote back, “There are too many benefits in this presentation.” I thought, “Well, what am I supposed to do? Too many benefits? Sorry about that, guys.”

“Lift and Shift,” Even with Obstacles

“By automating our service request process, we started meeting our SLAs for the first time in years. We’re getting closer to the model everybody is used to with www.dell.com, in which they order a computer and receive it 2-3 days later.”

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