A major international insurer and reinsurer with approximately 13,500 employees across Asia, Europe, and North America. They leverage their deep expertise and insights, offering commercial, personal and specialty products and risk management solutions to help people and businesses manage risks, build strength, and embrace change to their advantage.

Challenge

With a relatively mature, global IT organisation responsible for supporting a complex application and compliance environment, the customer service management team were looking to take the next step by enhancing management insight and transparency of IT service delivery for business leaders as well as improving overall employee experience when engaging with IT. 

They had already developed and implemented effective core ITSM processes, supported by a major investment in the ServiceNow platform, but were facing challenges demonstrating the value of the IT services they provided and connecting IT cost to business service demand. 

To address this, they initiated a journey to support the provision of a more business focused service delivery approach by implementing a single business service catalogue, engaging Mason Advisory to help define the architecture, foundational components, and approach to make this successful. 

The catalogue would facilitate business-based demand categorisation, provide a cost break down mechanism, and define a structure of service ownership and accountability, significantly improving visibility and analysis of IT performance including return on investment. It would also drive consolidation and standardisation of delivery capabilities with clear definitions of what IT provides to the business enhancing end-user experience. 

Solution

Mason Advisory were engaged to lay the foundations for implementing a business service catalogue by: 

• designing the catalogue architecture based around ServiceNow CSDM principles, 
• validating the architecture by mapping an initial set of services into the catalogue and demonstrating potential reporting and management insight,
• identifying the pre-requisites for catalogue deployment such as determining the data fields attributed to each service, 
• providing recommendations for defining a common definition of business criticality as well as business service alignment to service levels and reporting changes, including providing good practice service measures for each service type, 
• providing a wireframe model for a requestable catalogue to simplify service portal usage by recommending consolidation and restructuring of catalogue items,
• proposing a target operating model for the ongoing management and maintenance of the service catalogue once it has been implemented, 
• providing a series of recommendations for improvement based on the observations of our highly experienced staff throughout the engagement. 

We have also developed a high-level catalogue implementation strategy, which included an evaluation of the value delivered over time and an estimation of the necessary effort required. Examples included: 

• How the catalogue would enable a trusted relationship between IT and the business by aligning what IT provides to what the business consumes. 
• Facilitating management insights to better inform decision making and optimise ROI. 
• Informing the drive to optimise and standardise IT, improving efficiency and effectiveness. 
• simplifying business user engagement by managing incidents, requests and change in terms of the related Business Services. 

Outcome

In collaboration with the customer, Mason Advisory provided the tools, approach, and plan to successfully implement and then manage and maintain a business service catalogue efficiently and effectively. The underpinning catalogue architecture will enable further enhancement of ITSM processes through workflow and increased service maturity. This facilitates the optimisation of their ServiceNow platform, AI analytics and integration with other business management systems such as for finance and risk management. 

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