CASE STUDY

ServiceNow ITOM at Accenture

Accenture’s adoption of ITOM services simplifies IT operations management at scale and speed and increases data accuracy on IT infrastructure use.

Call for Change
When Tech Meets Human Ingenuity
A Valuable Difference
Meet the Team
Related Capabilities

Call for change

Accenture is applying the New now by pivoting to an IT posture that focuses on platforms, cloud, and ecosystem partners. In the area of platforms, Accenture has deployed ServiceNow for its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) strengths, including IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) to manage the organization’s IT assets and operations.

With ITOM, Accenture’s global IT organization wanted to address siloed and redundant systems for ITSM, ITOM, and Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs), as well as the lack of visibility into interconnectedness of infrastructure assets and mapping to supported services. Achieving consolidation and gaining improved visibility of global IT operations become increasingly important in the post-digital era especially given that more than 90 percent of Accenture’s ecosystem applications are hosted in the cloud.

When tech meets human ingenuity

Accenture’s ServiceNow strategy started as a tactical and technical re-platforming and has since evolved to a broader vision and journey aimed at transforming service and operations management. Accenture began with its migration of legacy ITSM tools to the ServiceNow platform. Accenture’s global IT organization executed a global consolidation of ITSM applications and processes to ServiceNow as its single system of action.

As Accenture embraced the new platform, follow-on work continued to improve service management processes. In the next year, the company deployed additional services, including a central IT request and self-service portal, Accenture Support, across all Accenture geographies.

The following year, Accenture furthered its global IT operations journey by adopting services from the ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) suite. The goal was to consolidate multiple, siloed CMDBs into one and gain transparency and control over Accenture services, applications, and infrastructure to improve critical service reliability and stability.

The ServiceNow ITOM suite helps enable multiple components, including the automation of infrastructure discovery, compliance maintenance, services mapping, and events rationalization. Accenture initially deployed Discovery and Event Management to cleanse the CMDB foundation to support the enablement of subsequent ITOM features.

Discovery is core to optimizing all other services within the ITOM suite and was enabled first. It provides new layers of insight into Accenture’s single CMDB through a single-pane-of-glass view that displays global IT’s assets within all the layers of the IT stack (application, platform, operating system, virtual and physical layers) and their internal and external dependencies.

Discovery scans internal infrastructure and populates all relevant configuration into the CMDB and maintains a consistent list of dependency maps, displaying interconnected IT assets. When a component fails, Discovery gives global IT better visibility to see all the other items that are dependent on it that may be affected, which enables faster response times and provides more information to IT operations teams about how to react. Global IT also has better insight into what teams own and manage which assets, and can dynamically direct events and issues to the right group for action.

"Before ServiceNow Discovery, we didn’t have a three-dimensional view of our infrastructure with all the interconnections. Now, we have a depth of detail into what we own and manage and how everything connects. It’s a huge leap in capability."

— RICH PALUMBO, Managing Director – Infrastructure and Application Development and Delivery – Accenture

With the growth of ephemeral IT assets (with shorter life cycles on the network), ServiceNow enables Accenture to keep up with constant change. For example, Accenture no longer maintains one server for three years, and instead manages multiple servers throughout a six-month period. To enable cloud services and discover the cloud, Accenture uses ITOM to see what assets are created, consumed, and how. To stay nimble, global IT limits customization to ensure faster adoption of new features and upgrades.

Accenture is furthering its artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) journey by tapping into event management to gain operational insights into application and service health, group related alerts, identify false positives, and isolate root causes to fix problems faster.

As Accenture’s global IT organization enables more services in the ServiceNow platform, it can evolve employees’ previous roles into platform roles. People are managing many of the same services, but increasingly within a more connected platform and form part of a larger and more connected organization that enables more visibility of the interactions between different teams and the dependencies they have amongst each other.

The ITOM and ITSM suites complement each other and enable new use of the ServiceNow platform to deliver more robust services, gain more accurate data, and have greater control over large hybrid environments such as Accenture’s. As ServiceNow’s ITOM utilization matures, Accenture plans to focus on refining CMDB design, rationalizing data sources, and deploying additional IT Operations Management (ITOM) components and Service Mapping to further streamline its environment.

ServiceNow Platform for IT Operations Management

A valuable difference

Accenture’s ITSM and ITOM journey on ServiceNow represents a steady progression of enabling relevant service components to simplify IT operations management at scale and at speed to keep pace with its evolving IT stack and landscape changes. The business value of ServiceNow’s ITOM capabilities is the increased data accuracy of Accenture infrastructure usage—what Accenture is consuming, where, and who is accountable for the infrastructure. Additionally, this data feeds into Accenture’s security operations, helping to support overall fortifications.

Combining ServiceNow’s ITOM components with Accenture’s existing log analytic and orchestrations platforms allows deeper insight on anomalies, extends the monitoring capability, and enables Accenture to develop more focused automation solutions to invoke action.

Key outcomes include: