How BP uses ServiceNow to transform into an “integrated energy company”

BP is one of the world’s most well-known and largest oil and gas companies, with a history of 110 years in the industry. However, the company is undergoing changes under the guidance of the newly appointed CEO Bernard Looney, who has expressed ambitious reorganization of the organization into an integrated energy company. What does it look like? Well, its goal is to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, reduce oil and gas production by 40% in the next ten years, invest 5 billion US dollars in renewable energy, and develop 50 GW of renewable energy production capacity.

Not surprisingly, in the coming decades, IT and digital technologies will play a huge role in supporting the dramatic changes in this approach. Roddy Barnes, BP’s head of IT strategy and planning, gave a speech at ServiceNow’s Now at Work event this week, talking about how the company launched the Now platform to create a common data model, introduce automation and democratize BP’s 80,000 employees.

For all diginomica coverage of Now at Work, please view our dedicated event resource center here. For the link to the event itself, click here.

Barnes explained that ServiceNow has been launched in the past three years to create a “digital work system” that allows employees to better control their work and real-time information about their performance. When commenting on BP’s new strategy, he said:

Frankly speaking, this is a very exciting place. As you can guess, IT and digitalization will play an important role in this. What I want to say is that we cannot perform this conversion without digital conversion. It’s about developing new digital-first business models. It’s about the way we generate, transport, trade, and sell energy to become more efficient, safer, and more reliable.

The way to do old IT is that large IT departments run large overall applications, and over time, it will slowly change as a set of customer needs change-it just won’t work properly. We realized early on that we need to conduct valuations faster. We have to try something quickly and cheaply. If they don’t work, throw them away and don’t cry for them. If they are effective, they can be expanded quickly, effectively, safely, and safely.

We need to democratize digital. Everyone is now an IT professional. Our employees expect more. They expect to be able to do something. They didn’t want to go to IT staff, and then a year later they got clumsy applications that they really didn’t want. They hope they can try these things in a few days.

Change role

When BP starts to think about the appearance of IT and digital technology in an organization, it must first consider the role of a digital product manager. Traditionally, this person will be an IT manager, responsible for running applications for the enterprise. However, this needs to be transformed into a true product manager who is always building, running, enabling and selling digital products.

So, what does this new digital product manager need? Some things include:

• Real-time understanding of their financial situation and the results of their choices

• Able to manage the supply and demand of skills in the class

• Understand their operational performance and the factors driving their development

• Understand how their delivery channels perform

• Understand how their products depend on and affect others in the digital ecosystem

• Manage the risks in its digital assets

Barnes said that the root of BP’s digital transformation is to enable people to carry out digital transformation on their own, which is based on the following three main ideas: 1) connect people, 2) build flexibility, and 3) automate everything.

Connect people

Barnes explained that the current reality is that everything in an organization is interconnected, depending on the network of interdependent products and services. Integration across people, platforms and networks is more important than ever. He added that realizing this to BP a few years ago was like “lightning”. IT should not base its model on traditional towers and boxes, but as a network of thousands of nodes. Digitalization requires dealing with complexity and connecting everyone in the organization. Barnes said:

This means that you must model it correctly, which is why we use ServiceNow. This is about using a very powerful single basic data model to put everything together. Everything refers to a data model, a processing method, and a single data model.

This has some very interesting implications. One of them is transparency. Once you compare Apple to Apple, and once everyone is in the same data model and in the same system of record, I can compare my budget to that of my friends. I can compare the backlog of work and the time to value. Isn’t it terrible? Still really exciting. Either way, I think this is good for business. I am doing it in real time. Of course I can correct, I can change. That’s because you understand your world as this network.

flexibility

In addition to contacts, the second focus is flexibility. Barnes pointed out that organizations are constantly changing, especially in large companies. He added that they usually carry out major reorganizations every year or every two years, but this has never really been recognized when building systems and processes.

Companies hard code their structure into their processes and work systems. BP didn’t want to make this mistake this time. Barnes explained:

We are absolutely certain that we will have a robust operating model, but hope to have a flexible model for change. In this way, the network changes every day. The fact that someone offers a certain product to others, this thing is always changing. Then every once in a while, as we are experiencing now, everything is changing, all structures are changing, and products are also changing.

The underlying IT assets will not change, you can map them to the correct location, which is what we are trying to build here. Again, the interesting meaning is control-this is the ability of our product manager friends to make changes in real time, change the product set, provide products, costs, and adjust. How they do business.

Automate everything

The last pillar of BP’s priority is about automation. Although automated processes can save costs and enable BP to operate lean IT workshops, for Barnes, it is more about providing self-service for 80,000 BP employees. He said:

We hope that everyone can build their own powerful applications or conduct their own data analysis or build their own machine learning models. We hope that they can cooperate effectively. A few years ago, this was unheard of for non-IT professionals.

Therefore, this first means automation, the automation engine. This also means a very good front door. This also means real robustness, because if you want to relax everyone, you need to make sure that things fit together well. And it needs an interface that is easy to pick up and easy to use.

Single digital working system

So, what does this look like? Barnes shared the following IT operation model, which was instantiated in ServiceNow. It’s mainly about using ServiceNow as a common data model and common record system, which allows BP to “compare Apple to Apple.”

Barnes added:

We spent a year [common data model] it is good. Then around it, we built an API layer in ServiceNow, which is an automation engine we built in ServiceNow. These two things allow us to make all these connections between a whole bunch of different systems and applications. So far, it took us about three years to complete. We started with IT service management, and the last major breakthrough this year was the use of ServiceNow IT business management module financial status.

During this period of time, Barnes stated that BP continued to push the limits of the Now platform, and since then it has established as many as 60 applications in ServiceNow.

However, the new approach is not without its challenges. It is to allow people to change the way they work, focusing on real-time adaptation and responsibility. Barnes said:

Not everyone wants to do their job. Frankly, some of these product managers think it’s under them. They hope to receive a PowerPoint every quarter to tell them what happened. What we are saying now is that you have to master your numbers in real time and you have to make changes yourself. Some of them see it as a management burden. And, frankly, I think it’s time for a change. I think this is no longer feasible. I think the effort, pain and inefficiency caused by the old method can no longer be supported. You only need to run lean, these data will not run once every quarter.

However, the benefits have been reaped. He added:

It helps us save a lot of costs, mainly when discussing through automation. We estimate the price faster. We will deliver in days instead of years. Many of them are related to agile practices and DevOps, and we have adopted wholesale. But it also has to do with how you add these things. It’s about automating boring processes and getting rid of them. And we are more reliable. Combine modern delivery methods and operation methods in the right way like this, and do it right, you can settle the cheap circle, and it can be faster and more reliable. I think there is no weighing of pros and cons these days.