Accenture bills itself as a company with “a global team.” This is great considering that the consulting giant has 537,000 employees in 200 cities around the world. In order to effectively achieve this goal, Accenture realized that it needs to operate its technology in a “delivering as one” approach.
At its core, the company deploys ServiceNow for IT service management and operations management. Accenture is actively pursuing a cloud strategy, but is integrating and integrating its processes, systems, and data into the ServiceNow platform to create a “single management platform” for IT users and IT operations.
Accenture began to launch ServiceNow in 2016, migrating the company’s traditional ITSM tools to the Now platform to create a “single action system.” Since then, this has evolved to cover IT requests and self-service in all Accenture regions.
Following this work, Accenture began to adopt the services in the ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) suite with the goal of consolidating multiple isolated CMDBs into one—to gain control and insights into Accenture’s services, applications, and infrastructure.
Bryan Locke, Infrastructure Manager of the Accenture IT organization, joined at this time because of his journey to the company’s infrastructure and organization’s cloud (it has a multi-cloud strategy, leveraging Azure, AWS, and GCP). Locke explained:
Our ServiceNow journey began in 2016. We see an opportunity to unify the business. Our CIO at the time, his original words were: “This is not a cost-saving operation, but to achieve long-term value for the internal IT organization.” This is the beginning of everything.
We integrate multiple ITSM platforms into one platform, and can unify our service management processes and procedures. Over time, we have enabled more and more services on different pillars of the organization. Like most companies, we started to provide mainly IT support. But then it gradually expanded to other business areas, such as finance, human resources, work space. Over time, this allows us to create experiences within the platform.
Therefore, I was asked to help import a lot of core data into the platform to make it easier, and praise ITSM as we passed it. Initially it is discovery, event management, and then start service mapping and enable other functions within the platform.
It’s about data
The key message drawn from this is that Accenture attaches great importance to importing quality data from all business areas into the ServiceNow platform to achieve more automated management. When considering IaaS, the company is already 90% in the cloud, and it is beginning to embrace PaaS more and more.
We all know that the transition to the cloud is necessary and will bring many benefits, but the management of the cloud environment will also bring challenges. Locke added:
This spread of the cloud can become very difficult to manage. The speed is good, but the speed and scale, as well as the lack of insight and visibility, have become a challenge.What I am talking about is to ensure all core data, whether it is its relationship with business services, how we provide it to our information security organization, how it provides us with service management-to me it is operation management
We have continuous and continuous control over what we have, what we have, when we enter the network, and when we leave the network-thus ensuring that all of this is done with minimal problems, high-quality data, and how this data is fed back to events and events manage.
Given that many areas of Accenture’s business have their own independent processes or investments on different platforms, Locke does not deny that this has not been a challenge for many years. But this is due to the strong support of the Accenture leadership team, who are keen to invest in a single platform throughout the organization. Locke said:
We started with our core CIO, but we are expanding to our network operations management, and we are now doing more regional offices-so we have a single glass view of everything.
We limited customization when we introduced it, because everyone wants their own small pieces, and we try to reshape and rethink some of the reasons they think they need these things. We embrace out-of-the-box as much as possible. I think we are also very successful in rationalizing the CMDB and rationalizing the incident and incident management process.
Mapping interest
Locke explained that one of the main benefits of importing Accenture’s IT and business data into the ServiceNow platform is that it allows technical capabilities to overcome complex integration challenges in the cloud and improve the availability and reliability of general services. He said:
By putting everything under one roof, it eliminates a lot of friction integration. This sounds basic, but when you have multiple layers of integration and you are providing data to an XML gateway, the gateway provides the data to another system, which in turn provides data to the other systems-when everything is in one When under the eaves, friction will decrease.
Another way we measure quality is the basic KPIs around service availability, data accuracy, event-to-event, correlation rules, and the number of events we have been avoiding. Then gradually measure the average resolution time. These are some of the ways we measure success.
In the above point of view, the ServiceNow platform also helps Accenture to identify problems (or incidents) before they actually become problems. In the past, when using legacy environments, most processes were handled by agents, relying on agents to trigger events when they occurred. Locke said:
When you enter the virtual layer, it lets you know if something exists when it is created, that is, when it is created. You can trigger an event and it says: “Hey, I just found a virtual machine, let’s discover the operating system, let’s see what it has, let’s send this data to InfoSec, so that at zero we get With this information, we provide safe operations for those.
So our automation part is to use data and become more data-driven in ServiceNow. It just gives us more control and more inspections. This is something we have been working on in the past.
This is possible because the core is a single CMDB. Every part of Accenture’s business is helping this “single source of truth”, and Locke and his team have been “resolutely” to ensure that this is a priority. He said:
We do not allow others to create their own small islands, new islands or fixed data elsewhere. This simply means that we always invest in the same subset of data. You no longer need to wait for planning, scanning, and batch processing operations, but push more content to the data drive and update in time. This is where there are many benefits.
Promoter
A common data model that follows common rules and is stored in one place has not been implemented because Accenture likes to be dogmatic about these things. No, this is Locke and his team deliberately letting the organization into a place where more automation can be adopted. He explained:
I think prioritization and sorting are very important. Make sure your ordering is correct-if you don’t do Y, you can’t do X. Make sure you sort the things you want and align them with business goals. If quality data is your first step, you know where to start. Without high-quality data, large-scale automation cannot be carried out. I think this is definitely the key.
Put all of these in a common place, use common rules, and it is the enabler of automation. No matter where you are, we can always find reusable automation opportunities. When we receive an event from the infrastructure, we intercept the event, and we will first try to run the automation to see if it can be resolved before the event is created. In the past, everything triggered events directly from source code monitoring tools, and we have gotten rid of this.
When it comes to providing advice to other organizations that want to adopt a similar approach, one thing Accenture recommends is to ensure that the company is in place and use the program to improve the skills of some of its employees. Locke added:
I think it is also important to bring business to the negotiating table. In the past, I think some people viewed ServiceNow as an enemy. The reason is that they think they will lose their jobs. So a lot of what we have been doing is bringing the team into the ServiceNow team, we use economies of scale with these teams, and then they eventually leave and become ServiceNow developers elsewhere in the platform.
So I think it shows people the benefits, benefits, and long-term goals of ServiceNow, and provides them with a career path within the platform.
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