WaterNSW Surges to New Level of Service Management Efficiency with ServiceNow WaterNSW is a state-owned corporation that supplies raw water from dams, pipelines, and rivers to regional towns, Sydney Water, and other licensed authorities, retail suppliers, and councils. The organization manages 33 times the volume of water in Sydney Harbour, while the catchment area of its dams is larger than the United Kingdom.

The New South Wales government created WaterNSW in January 2015 by merging the Sydney Catchment Authority and the State Water Corporation, with water delivery functions from the Department of Primary Industry (DPI) Water transferred progressively from 1 July 2016.

Consolidate, standardise, and improveFollowing the initial merger, WaterNSW had to consolidate, standardise, and improve the performance of the disparate systems used to manage business-critical functions. These systems and facilities ranged from enterprise resource planning and telecommu-nications applications to specialist hydrometrics, geographical information, and water licensing, and account management software.

The challenge included replacing a range of legacy vendor-owned and custom-built systems used to deliver IT and business services. These systems did not comply with the benchmark ITIL standard used for IT service management within organisations, and team members often had to request services by phone, email, or in person, rather than through a single system interface.

WaterNSW embarked on a four-year, multi-million dollar project to transform its overall IT operations, and appointed Gordon Dunsford as chief information officer. Dunsford, who had used ServiceNow in a previous role, immediately saw the potential of the vendor’s software at WaterNSW to transform IT services delivery and operate as a broader business services management tool for the organisation.

“We needed a platform that would empower our people to work smarter and grow with WaterNSW as we pursued better customer engagement and outcomes,” said Dunsford.

ServiceNow best met needsWaterNSW undertook a comprehensive review of leading service management platforms and quickly determined that ServiceNow best met its needs. “We were particularly impressed by the flexibility of the platform and how quickly it could pervade the organi-sation,” said Dunsford. “WaterNSW is typically staffed by people who are quite practical and inclined to ‘taste and feel’ systems to see how they perform. ServiceNow provided that opportunity.”

Highlights

Newly created government organisation deploys ServiceNow to transform IT and business service management.

Organisation

WaterNSW

Business

Government

Headquarters

Sydney, New South Wales

Geographies

New South Wales

Modern ITSM

• ServiceNow Incident Management

• ServiceNow Request Management

• ServiceNow Problem Management

• ServiceNow Change Management

• Demand Management

• Project Portfolio Management

Implementation timeline

• Early 2016 - first iteration of ServiceNow

• Up to August 2017 - two subsequent iterations

“We will continue to use ServiceNow to automate and digitise services no matter where they are. Into early 2018, we expect to manage 500 services through ServiceNow, of which only 100 will be IT-related.” —Gordon Dunsford, CIO, WaterNSW

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In early 2016, WaterNSW commenced the first release of ServiceNow and deployed ServiceNow Incident Management, ServiceNow Problem Management, and ServiceNow Change Management. “We established a beach-head in IT with these modules before extending ServiceNow further into the organisation,” stated Dunsford. “As people saw the benefits and opportunities the system presented, it took off like wildfire.”

By August 2017, WaterNSW had completed its third release and up to 900 team members were accessing about 300 services. These extended from IT services to business services spanning environment, water, information and records management, physical security, people and culture, assets, engineering, customer and community, and training. All of these services are included in a catalogue that team members can access through their phones, the web, or the WaterNSW intranet.

A rigorous, systemic approach to business servicesDeploying ServiceNow has enabled WaterNSW to operate a rigorous, systemic approach to delivering business services, and apply ITIL standards to align IT services with the broader needs of the organisation. “Our service delivery is now completely transparent and we provide a single pane-of-glass view of all the functions of the organ-isation,” said Dunsford. “We can now sit down regularly with our governance board and each of our business units to discuss how to deliver each of the services they require.”

A backlog of requestsServiceNow’s usability has made WaterNSW business teams feel comfortable identi-fying opportunities to automate and digitise services. “Three or four months into each release cycle, we draw a line in the sand in terms of requests we can accommodate in the next iteration of our service management system,” said Dunsford. “As at August 2017, we had a backlog of requests from areas such as field force management, legal, asset management, water data, and water quality that will take us another three or four releases to work through.”

WaterNSW is now using ServiceNow functionality to record, measure, and report on service delivery in the leadup to establishing key performance indicators and service level agreements. “Because we’ve been in integration mode, we’ve not been a ‘steady state’ organisation where performance metrics and trends can easily be established and identified,” stated Dunsford. “However, we expect to identify these in the near future and use them to drive further efficiencies throughout our operations.”

A strategic platformWaterNSW views ServiceNow as a strategic platform that will play a key role in modernising service delivery. The organisation’s initial focus on IT service management has shifted to broader service management, with IT accounting for only 75 of the 300 services managed through ServiceNow as of August 2017.

“We will continue to use ServiceNow to automate and digitise services no matter where they are,” said Dunsford. “Into early 2018, we expect to manage 500 services through ServiceNow, of which only 100 will be IT-related.”

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“We were particularly impressed by the flexibility of the platform and how quickly it could pervade the organisation. WaterNSW is typically staffed by people who are quite practical and inclined to

‘taste and feel’ systems to see how they perform. ServiceNow provided that opportunity.”

—Gordon Dunsford, CIO, WaterNSW

WaterNSW Case Study

servicenow.com