Driving continuous improvement in service operations
The Star Entertainment Group (The Star) offers a variety of hotel and entertainment experiences, gaming facilities, as well as food and beverage outlets through The Star Sydney, The Star Gold Coast, and Treasury Brisbane. Its vision is to become a leading integrated resort company in Australia and bring thrilling experiences to all guests.
The Star had been benefiting from ServiceNow for several years but as the organization’s digital transformation needs change, the company wanted to get more value from the platform. With the goal of improving efficiency and timely IT services, Alex Matijevic, Group Manager for IT Operations & Services, and his team launched the Project Renovation program to drive continuous improvements in services, security, and user satisfaction.
“My experience with ServiceNow has been overwhelmingly positive over many years,” Alex explains. “I knew we could maximize the benefits that the platform offers and provide the right service operations for the business.”
Previously, different departments in each property within The Star used their own processes and methods for service request management, such as emails or forms to raise an incident. With support from ServiceNow Partner TCloud, The Star has digitalized over 80 paper-based processes with ServiceNow IT Service Management Professional (ITSM Pro) and ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM).
The IT team now has a single platform to increase the efficiency of technology service operations.
“Through our BI dashboard integrated with ServiceNow, we gain a real-time view of what’s happening in service operations, allowing us to move from using our gut feeling to being more data-driven,” says Alex.
Although guests and patrons of The Star may not directly interact with ServiceNow, they reap the benefits. ServiceNow Discovery and Configuration Management Database (CMDB) provides the IT team with real-time visibility into the entire infrastructure and enables faster diagnosis of trends in incidents, such as constant load increase within an application which may negatively affect the staff or patron experience. Alex and his team can now proactively apply changes to certain applications to mitigate that fluctuation in demand.
“ServiceNow enables us to proactively fix problems before they become problems. This helps to ensure high service availability and minimizes the impact on our employees or patrons,” says Bethany Mah, Continuous Improvement Manager at The Star Entertainment Group
Elevating employee experience with Microsoft Teams
Initially, the use of ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams was limited to about 2,000 corporate team members. As continuous improvement is one of the key drivers for the Project Renovation program, The Star wanted to improve the accessibility of tools and make it easy for 8,000 employees across three properties to remain connected with each other.
“Our big dream is to uplift the overall employee experience. ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams empower all 8,000 users to self-service wherever they are and whenever they need to ask questions,” says Bethany.
By integrating Microsoft Teams with ServiceNow Virtual Agent “Bunji” (Aboriginal word for mate or friend), users can easily lodge a request or track the status of an incident or approval via Microsoft Teams on their mobiles or laptops without having to launch another tool or application.
The automation also helps to reduce the number of calls to the IT team, as more issues are resolved through live chat. They can also spend more time on complex and higher-value tasks. This has resulted in better service levels for the IT team and increased satisfaction for employees.
Improved threat detection and response capabilities
Before implementing ServiceNow, the cybersecurity team used spreadsheets and other tools to capture information about security incidents. There was no cohesive view of all the incidents and risks, making it difficult to respond to threats efficiently.
Using ServiceNow Automation Engine and Security Incident Response with Microsoft Sentinel, the cybersecurity team can now track, validate, and respond to all incidents across the organization via a single console.
By gathering the data from Microsoft Sentinel and using ServiceNow Security Incident Response to automatically ingest alerts and create incidents, the cybersecurity team can quickly identify threats and take action to mitigate risk.
Also, linking ServiceNow CMDB with Security Incident Response (SIR) to scan all assets (40,000 configuration items) connected to the network will provide insight for the security team to understand the causes of repeat incidents and improve its response capabilities.
“ServiceNow Vulnerability Response provides a consolidated view of vulnerabilities and their level of criticality in the systems, helping us to drive resolution with our internal and external support partners and reduce the likelihood of a cyber-incident,” says James Fraser, Head of Cyber Operations.
A significant element of success, says Alex, is the investment made in ensuring the CMDB was correctly populated and maintained using ServiceNow Discovery. Getting this right was an important step and one that Alex had learned from his previous experience of deploying ServiceNow.
Optimising investment for the future
With a focus on continuous improvement, Alex says the investment that The Star Entertainment Group has made in ServiceNow puts it in a great position for the future.
“Getting the foundation right makes us a more responsive and agile organization,” he concludes. “That’s reflected in increasing staff engagement and the amazing experiences we deliver to our customers every day.”
See how TCloud can help your company with your digital transformations
The article can be found here on the ServiceNow website here