The Customer
The Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) is a membership body that is committed to strengthening society through world-class governance. As an organisation, AICD aims to be the independent and trusted voice of governance, building the capability of a community of leaders for the benefit of society. AICD maintains a strong and growing membership of more than 45,000 professionals, comprised of directors and senior leaders from business, government, and the not-for-profit sectors.
The Challenge
With 300 employees spanning locations across Australia, for the AICD, unstructured work patterns reigned supreme across the organisation.
“The challenge for AICD was a heavy reliance on email and inflexible legacy tooling which provided poor visibility of operations, as well as delays and roadblocks when transferring work between teams.” states Mim Vaissizadeh, Service Delivery Manager at AICD.
“This created a high volume of manual work, leading to inconsistent engagement with our customers and detracted from the end user experience.”
These challenges were not unique to the IT team; they impacted the entire organisation. The staff were used to ‘the way they always did things’ and simply were unaware that their ways of working could be improved.
The Solution
AICD saw an opportunity to revolutionise the user experience for employees, while improving their effectiveness and customer experience. The vision was to decrease dependence on email by introducing a portal experience that delivered a one-stop-shop to centralise engagement, whilst also enabling teams to gain insights into workload and performance. AICD selected ServiceNow as their single tool for enterprise service management, to deliver this organisation-wide change and truly own the transition to an Enterprise Service Management approach.
“The complexities came in by understanding AICD’s existing work patterns and defining processes and workflows, rather than the technical delivery of the solution.” Dan Marsh, Head of ServiceNow at AC3 said.
“We delivered core ITSM capabilities and a service catalogue to drive consistent engagement of the new portal and continued to help AICD when we implemented an additional scoped application to enable the wider business to engage Finance with digitised workflows via the portal.” he says.
AC3 also addressed a unique challenge by automating the interface with the AICD HR tool (ELMO) which had no API plugins or web interfaces. The integration was established to further align and enrich employee records from creation, modification or disabling through ServiceNow’s Orchestration capabilities.
AC3 then proceeded to onboard the Education Team who have high engagement with AICD members but interact heavily with the wider AICD business.
AC3 delivered a similar solution to that of Finance in a scoped application, but with a less rigorous security model.
To further drive centralised engagement and remove unstructured work patterns of the Marketing team, AC3 created another scoped application within ServiceNow to digitise operations. With their own set of catalogue items and defined workflows, the team were able to prioritise work, drive engagement with customers direct from ServiceNow, and gain valuable insight on the type and volume of work reaching the team.
Throughout the AC3 delivery of these initiatives, AC3 also enabled the Automated Testing Framework (ATF) for deployed processes in the platform. This reduced testing times, improved testing reliability, and has enabled AICD to complete upgrades faster and in an agile way.
Following this initial program of work, AC3 is also delivering managed services for AICD to continue to evolve and maintain their ServiceNow platform.
The Results
Within 18 months, AC3 and the AICD team have brought IT, Marketing, Finance, Legal and Education into a single platform to undertake their day-to-day work.
“We now have increased insight into our operational delivery with real-time dashboards. We’ve reduced manual work with digitised workflow and significantly improved user experience and gained consistency in customer experience and engagement points” states Mim.
“We continue to realise more benefits through AC3’s Champion Enablement training program that allows us to ensure maximum value is achieved, even after implementation.”
“We look forward to working with AC3 to further digitise, enable and unlock the productivity of our teams through the ServiceNow Platform” concludes Mim.