Deloitte selects ServiceNow to improve internal operations
ServiceNow selected ahead of CA and HP because of simplicity, says IT director
Business advisory firm Deloitte has selected IT management services provider ServiceNow's software-as-a-service (SaaS) suite to improve its internal operations in a three-year contract.
In the next two weeks, Deloitte will go live with the incident, problem, change tools and a configuration management database. This will form phase one of the firm's shift to ServiceNow, according to its IT director, Mark Westbrook.
"Deloitte was looking to replace what we had in phase one and phase two would be the bigger changes," he told Computing.
Phase two of the project will be to implement the release management, service level management and purchasing and levelling management tools.
Westbrook explained that he selected the firm's current product, HP Service Desk (HPSD), 12 years ago and that Deloitte had to change the system for two main reasons.
"HPSD served us well but the vendor was not extending support on the product after 2012, and this was one reason to change. Secondly, we are undergoing an IT transformation project and attempting to drive through changes in departments.
"We set out a mission statement for what we wanted in the toolset as it is not just used for IT services but for internal services client functions such as HR and facilities," he explained.
The selection of ServiceNow came after Deloitte looked at Gartner's magic quadrant of the top five IT service desk products. It then narrowed the vendors down to three: HP, CA and ServiceNow.
Commenting on how ServiceNow's product compared to its competitors, Westbrook said: "It was the simplest of the products we looked at. The staff that were going to use the product looked at a demo [of each of the tools] and ServiceNow was the most intuitive and easy to follow.
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Deloitte selects ServiceNow to improve internal operations
ServiceNow selected ahead of CA and HP because of simplicity, says IT director
"We had criteria which included things such as automation and alerting, self-service, mobility and service level management and each product was scored on these. The selection of ServiceNow was also based on financials," he said.
The change will affect 13,000 UK and Switzerland employees and will follow the direction of Deloitte's Canadian operations, which already use ServiceNow.
Westbrook said that ServiceNow had "very strong service management models based on [the set of practices for IT service management] ITIL" and requires less implementation time than an on-premises tool.
"As the SaaS infrastructure is there, ServiceNow will support it so that when we make a change to a particular module, they handle the uptime and metrics that go around it," he explained.
Deloitte hired consultancy firm TeamUltra for the implementation of ServiceNow, and Westbrook said that the firm was satisfied with the work that had been completed so far.
"It is not a product that changes every year as a lot of time and money goes into it and we have had very good support from TeamUltra and ServiceNow. A big part of the work was to decide which processes we wanted to keep from HPSD and they were responsive with this," said Westbrook.
"The vendor has supported the product, unlike HPSD which was not a product that [HP] were investing in after a few years," he added.
According to Westbrook, Deloitte users would mostly appreciate the chat tool that ServiceNow provides.
"It is the ability to communicate within internal departments, especially as we have a mobile workforce. The old system was quite cumbersome; sending and receiving emails," he said.