The ServiceNow market continues to be a key battleground for the provider community, particularly as enterprise demand far outstrips the supply of talent. Any successful engagement relies on having a partner that can bring experienced and capable professionals to work with clients, which is the very nature of this ServiceNow talent crisis. For particular regions and geographies, this can present even more of a challenge—as talent becomes a hard-fought battleground between providers and enterprises alike. Enterprise leaders must carefully scrutinize potential partners to ensure they have the right blend of skills and experience to support their engagement.

For Spark NZ, a national telecommunications company based in New Zealand, finding a partner with the right skills and experience was easier than for most. It selected Infosys to support a major ServiceNow rollout for two key reasons. The first reason is that Infosys was one of the few providers in the local market that could deliver; the second reason was that over the last decade, the two firms had formed a deep, collaborative partnership.

“We needed a technical solution, which came in the form of ServiceNow, with Infosys providing the necessary talent.”

—Mike Roigard, General Manager of Service Operations, Spark NZ

At the outset of the engagement, according to Mike Roigard, General Manager of Service Operations at Spark NZ, there were six different instances of legacy service management tools managing workflow across the organization, functioning in a highly complex environment. The complexity—built out of a need to keep data from internal business units and external clients separate—led to several core business challenges. Foremost, onboarding new clients and managing workflows was a time-intensive process; onboarding alone could take months, and getting to the bottom of which work is chargeable was a tricky business.

The upshot, according to Mike, is that they needed a technical solution to simplify the service management platforms. Mike pointed out, “ServiceNow provided the technology platform, and Infosys brought the talent and expertise to build the solution.” The expertise provided by Infosys was particularly important as there isn’t a huge amount of in-country expertise with the platform.

The challenge: simplify complex service management, but keep data segregated

The decision to move away from six legacy instances to a single ServiceNow platform tackled the initial challenge Spark wanted to solve—simplifying a complex service management technology stack. But as is often the case, there’s a caveat; segregating data from internal and external clients was a mandatory requirement for the team. So, the solution was not only to amalgamate six legacy instances into one ServiceNow platform, but also to keep data segregated within the platform to solve for this requirement. According to Infosys and Spark, this project even had the ServiceNow technical team stumped initially. Amalgamating so many instances while keeping the data segregated simply hadn’t been done before. ServiceNow, Infosys, and Spark’s technical experts worked side-by-side to build a solution that ticked all of the necessary boxes.

“This was a very experimental project; amalgamating so many instances while keeping the data segregated simply hadn’t been done before.”

—Raghuveer Moorthy, ServiceNow Technical Architect, Infosys

Mike was clear, however, throughout the initial roadmap that the solution needed to be simple, and, because the team wanted to upgrade to new versions of ServiceNow with relative ease, the solution needed to avoid configurations that would cause problems further down the line. According to Mike, there is a simple mantra to follow “Configure to your heart’s content, but don’t customize.” This approach not only saw the implementation of a highly complex solution but, because of a commitment to avoid complex customizations, Spark was also one of the first to be upgraded to ServiceNow’s London release. This quick, successful implementation is a testament to the joint ingenuity of Spark’s technical team, Infosys, and the ServiceNow team that worked alongside them.

From months to a couple of days—a shorter onboarding process is just one of the business outcomes delivered; above all, “Infosys delivered on time, on budget, and a solution of exceptional quality.”

As with many of its competitors, Spark NZ is under a great deal of pressure to keep costs down, which means it often needs to do more with the same resources. Removing inefficiency is, therefore, vital to success in the market. Because so many resources were spread across several service management tools, bringing them together on to one platform had easily recognizable benefits. Foremost, the onboarding process shrank from months to days. The whole process is now condensed to a single form, streamlining the entire workflow and removing a considerable resource burden in the process.

But Spark recognized other efficiencies by extending the platform to new teams. Historically, understanding and breaking down chargeable services across the disparate platforms was a real challenge, but by building a centralized platform and integrating it directly with the billing team, Spark was able to improve the process without increasing resources. The tool itself was very well received by end-users, fueling higher uptake with a broader recognition that workflows were helping teams do more. For Spark, the process was relatively pain-free: “Infosys delivered on time, on budget, and a solution of exceptional quality.”

It’s unexpected that a project of this scale and complexity would complete without a hitch, but according to the Spark team, that’s what happened. Apart from a few team issues at the start of the project, which were swiftly rectified, the new solution did exactly what it needed to with minimal business impact. According to Mike, Spark had set up war rooms to handle any major issues, but “by the end, we were just sitting there because no calls or issues were coming through.” Infosys expressed the same sentiments, with the project team titling it an ambitious project with the clear sign of success that comes from a “zero noise implementation”—one that lands without a hitch.

The Bottom Line: Supported by a technical dream team and a collaborative partnership, a previously unheard-of business solution resulted in success.

It’s quite an accomplishment for an enterprise and a service provider to draw up a design for a solution that even leaves members of the platform’s technical team scratching their heads. Nevertheless, Spark, Infosys, and ServiceNow teamed up to build a solution that would bring together six separate ITSM instances while keeping the data of each one segmented. Crucially, the solution not only solved several complex and critical business challenges, but it was also implemented in a way that the business, which relied on the multiple original toolsets to manage workflow, felt zero negative impact. In an intensely competitive market riven with talent shortages, it’s a testament to Infosys’ strong collaborative partnership with Spark NZ, demonstrating its commitment to innovate and deliver high-quality solutions to solve critical business challenges. According to Mike at Spark NZ, this project has only just begun as Spark plans to roll out more ServiceNow modules and bring the platform to more of Spark’s clients and subsidiaries. And with a strong and collaborative partner in place, it is confident it will continue driving more business benefits using ServiceNow.