Case Study

An Innovative Approach to Business Resiliency PlanningWith ServiceNow, a Capital Financing Firm Can Prioritize Resiliency Plans by Business Impact

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Case Study

It’s ironic. Business resiliency planning is all about protecting business performance—yet all too often these plans are made in a business context vacuum. In many cases, there is limited visibility into the business impact caused by outages, making it difficult to prioritize investments and remediation efforts according to business needs.One financial services firm was determined to bridge the gap between operational capabilities and business priorities. As one of the world’s most recognized and trusted brands in capital financing, the company has always taken pride in delivering the superior reliability and performance its customers expect. But recently, the firm saw an opportunity to take business resiliency planning to an even higher level—with a transformational solution from ServiceNow.

Extending IT service management to business resiliency management In 2015, the firm’s parent company announced a strategic shift that required the divestiture of billions of dollars of commercial assets. During the transition, a strong business resiliency strategy was more vital than ever, and executive leadership saw this as the right time to enhance the firm’s resiliency planning capabilities.The company established three core objectives: increase the overall availability of business services, transition to focus on resiliency rather than remediation, and enable IT to prioritize based on business goals. Those objectives required more than an incremental improvement in IT operational capabilities. They required a transformation.At the time, the firm’s resiliency management was operationally disconnected from its IT, according to a senior executive. There was no way to show the business impact of a particular outage because they couldn’t map business services back to the IT assets that supported them. Previously, asset owners would set the criticality level based on their own criteria, often without business context. In some cases, they’d discover that a business process that was critical had been supported by an application that wasn’t considered critical.At the same time, the firm’s legacy availability platform was nearing obsolescence. The firm spent 18 months asking a multitude of vendors how they could help transform business resiliency planning, and their answer always involved replicating what the firm already had. They needed a more innovative approach.

Highlights ServiceNow helps a financial services firm implement a transformational business resiliency planning solution that bridges the gap between IT capabilities and business objectives.

Challenges • Lack of visibility into business impact of outages

• No cohesive, end-to-end view of the recovery or risk landscape

• Problem/incident criticality based on guesswork, not business needs

ServiceNow Solutions • ServiceNow Platform

- Integrated processes and data flow

- Clear view of the risk landscape

- Easy-to-use, intuitive portal

- Granular levels of security

- No loss of preexisting functionality

• ServiceNow Inspire

- Concise presentation of the business case

- Facilitated executive buy-in

Results• Ability to prioritize incident resolution according to business value

• More accurate resiliency planning due to more and better data

• Higher asset valuations through increased transparency

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Case Study

of its business processes

For the first time, the company had total visibility into the IT infrastructure that supports all

The firm had been using the ServiceNow platform for IT Service Management (ITSM) at the time the strategic shift was announced, and the ServiceNow team proposed expanding the use of the platform to business resiliency planning. At first, executive leaders were skeptical. They didn’t understand how ServiceNow could simply morph its ITSM system into something that would provide visibility into the risk landscape as well. After strategy meetings with multiple stakeholders—from enterprise architects to business leaders—the ServiceNow team began to change people’s minds. When the firm’s stakeholders really examined the capabilities the ServiceNow Platform is best at—connecting IT assets to business services, integrating data from multiple sources, extracting business-relevant insights from IT operations—they found that those were exactly the capabilities that could help transform risk assessment and resiliency management. Specifically, the ServiceNow Platform gave them the ability to map critical business processes, such as loan approvals, to the systems and applications that deliver them. This, in turn, enabled them to establish a recovery time objective (RTO) for each IT asset based on the criticality and allowable downtime of the business process it supported. For the first time, the company had total visibility into the IT infrastructure that supports all 3,000 of its business processes so they could see and quantify the business impact of an outage whether it was an application, a system, or a data center. That meant resiliency planning was no longer just an IT or operational conversation; it was a business conversation.

Achieving a transformation through full resiliency managementStarting in 2015, the firm used the ServiceNow Platform to build a full resiliency management solution. For each business process, the platform identifies all the elements that support the service, such as locations, vendors, and specialized non-IT equipment, using an intuitive, graphical interface that can be understood by nontechnical users. The firm has been able to create a record of all its business process dependencies. And as soon as anything changes—for example, when someone modifies vendor details or adds a new database—the corresponding process records are automatically updated.Resiliency planners can then use ServiceNow to build resiliency plans. They simply select the processes that form part of the plan and then add plan-specific information, such as recovery strategies, recovery procedures, external dependencies, and plan contact information. This gives planners the flexibility to develop plans tailored for specific needs and locations while using a consistent set of process information. The firm created all its plans using the ServiceNow Knowledge Management platform, which provides an online knowledge base that documents the company’s entire business resiliency strategy.

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Case Study

Driving executionThe firm also uses ServiceNow to exercise its resiliency plans. It has created a ServiceNow module that allows users to develop full exercise strategies that cover key loss scenarios, such as the loss of facilities, IT, vendors, and key personnel. For example, a facility loss scenario might involve a gas leak at a specific facility that makes the building unusable for several days. The exercise scenario establishes how to recover from this loss—for example, by having people work from home or move to another facility.These exercise scenarios are then tested, for instance by having a limited number of people transferred to another facility. During this exercise process, the firm verifies everything is in place for recovery. This includes checking that their people have access to the data, processes, communications infrastructure, and the other key resources they need. The firm uses ServiceNow to capture evidence from these exercises, as well as any issues it finds. ServiceNow then tracks those issues to final resolution.

Increasing business value—and business valuationExecutives at the firm voiced enthusiasm about the outcome of the engagement. “Before ServiceNow, if we had an incident, we had to pull multiple reports from multiple systems and go through them one by one, and it was very time consuming,” said one executive. “Now we can go into the dashboard and get the information we need in seconds. It has cut our response times by hours.”The ServiceNow Platform also provides visibility and control across the firm’s entire business resiliency management strategy. Now executives can see and understand their risks, they can view data and processes holistically, and they can instantly run reports to see where they stand.The firm has evolved service management beyond IT and into multiple facets of its business. When there’s a data center issue anywhere in the world, executives know instantly which financial, legal, or other processes are affected, what the criticality level is, and how it will be fixed. Having hard data about business services also contributes to an unexpected business outcome, according to one executive: potentially higher valuations for assets. The proceeds from the divestiture were higher than book value in some cases, he noted. While that fact can be attributed to many possible causes, there’s no doubt that having accurate data linking IT assets to business priorities can contribute to a higher business valuation, in his opinion.“Overall, our experience with ServiceNow has been extremely rewarding,” said one executive. “I feel like they’re part of our team. They give us ideas; they show us new ways to do things; they’re a true partner.”

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Now we can go into the dashboard and get the information we need in seconds. It has cut our response times by hours.

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