Uniting leading media organizations through digital transformation
Discover how a leading media and entertainment enterprise used ServiceNow to unite their IT service management experience and lay the groundwork for a unified enterprise management platform.
In this story:
- IT Service Management (ITSM) transformation
- Managing Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) complexity
- Creating a unified enterprise management platform
In an era marked by rapid technological advancement and shifting consumer expectations, the media and entertainment industry faces intense competition for customers in an increasingly saturated market. Thin profit margins are driving a relentless push for innovation and new experiences, compelling media and entertainment companies to explore a wide range of strategies to stay ahead. These strategies leverage cutting-edge technologies like Generative AI for growth, and strategic M&A to reshape the competitive landscape.
In 2022, a significant merger united two prominent media and entertainment organizations to create a larger, global organization. One was a leader in factual and lifestyle television brands with a successful expansion into streaming services. The other organization had a rich heritage, evolving its focus over time to include film, television, and streaming, while also diversifying into areas such as video games, telecommunications, theme parks, and more. Unifying under a single brand was merely the first step; true integration demanded a deeper, more holistic approach. Harmonizing diverse IT systems, including separate ServiceNow instances, and leveraging insights from prior Deloitte UK engagements, was crucial. By establishing consistent, people-centric processes, the groundwork was laid for a unified enterprise management platform. This platform enabled scalability and genuine operational integration, fostering a cohesive and unified company.
The challenge
Despite the significant potential of the ServiceNow platform, the client encountered key challenges that, once addressed, would unlock their ability to scale effectively:
1. Service Management Inefficiencies:
• The absence of a clear governance framework provided an opportunity to refine catalog designs and enhance the overall user experience, ensuring greater consistency across the platform.
• The diverse approaches across teams highlighted areas for collaboration and alignment, paving the way for breaking down silos and improving operational efficiency.
2. Onboarding Bottlenecks:
• The lack of a standardized framework created an opportunity to streamline service designs and accelerate service delivery, ensuring faster and more consistent outcomes.
• The absence of structured onboarding processes revealed areas for improvement in speeding up the introduction of new services, fostering better knowledge sharing, improving resource utilization, and driving more efficient service delivery.
To truly unite the combined company’s teams and workflows, the newly formed media brand needed to develop reliable and scalable shared IT services:
• Creating a resilient technology ecosystem
During a high-profile event, when streaming services were impacted, the organization recognized the need for a more holistic view and enhanced control over IT assets, total cost of operation, and services to strengthen trust in the brand. At the same time, they sought ways to empower employees with a consistent and unified experience. Given the recent merger and ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, many team members and stakeholders had not yet had the opportunity to meet in person, which posed some challenges to collaboration.
• Unifying ServiceNow platform instances
Both companies had customized instances of ServiceNow, which could serve as a potential solution. However, the combined organization had to decide whether to adopt one of the existing systems or start anew with a fresh approach. With differing levels of agility and modernization between the television company and film-forward organization, the new team needed to redefine its shared IT services to achieve a nimble, flexible working culture.
• Streamlining IT services
To build a cohesive global team and reduce the IT complexity of working between two ServiceNow instances, the organization needed to implement a system that accommodated different geographies, languages, and local compliance requirements.
“A high level of honesty and trust was critical during the entire process. Stakeholders didn’t feel like they needed to mince their words, and we collected actionable feedback we could deliver on. By realizing that we needed to create an experience and a culture for our people that’s frictionless, we turned this project around in limited time but with high impact.”
- Deloitte UK Media and Entertainment client
The solution
The Deloitte UK team took a methodical, hybrid agile approach to its IT Service Management (ITSM) implementation. By kicking off with a new implementation of ServiceNow, the enterprise had a new-found opportunity to set the tone for transformation with its people at the core. To seamlessly launch its greenfield ServiceNow ITSM instance and establish reliable and repeatable processes for business transformation, teams focused on three key areas to help drive the project’s success:
Consistent executive buy-in:
Underpinning the project’s momentum and success was unwavering senior and management stakeholder support. By fostering relationships beyond the core program team and IT leadership, the project team secured enterprisewide support.
While different departments had developed unique visions, executive engagement helped to ensure alignment with the transformation’s overarching goals and guaranteed that individual value and input were considered at every stage.
A collaborative, agile approach
Recognizing that collaboration was critical to successful integration, Deloitte UK leveraged its specialist knowledge in enterprise agility. This approach, with its focus on rapid value delivery, adaptability, and continuous iteration, was brought to life through numerous three-day workshops. Each workshop, involving 40-50 stakeholders, fostered invaluable collaboration and understanding.
This connection proved especially valuable as teams navigated the complexities of merging organizational cultures after a period of pandemic-induced distance.
Prioritization of user adoption:
The organizational change management team, closely integrated with functional workstreams, embedded user experience and adoption considerations into every process. Drawing on deep experience in learning and development, Deloitte UK advised on a comprehensive learning curriculum including frequent engagement sessions, a content-rich employee portal, concise communications, and a Generative AI-enabled virtual chatbot agent.
This multi-faceted approach empowered employees with the knowledge and tools needed to embrace the new system and ways of working. The results speak for themselves: within two weeks of launch, the chatbot handled 4,235 interactions from 2,556 users, with nearly two-thirds of survey respondents rating their experience positively.
This experience, delivered through a combination of strong governance, leadership, change management, and a focus on user adoption, achieved not only the desired IT transformation, but became the foundation for numerous other transformation projects to come.
The impact
By creating connected IT services that spanned the global organization, the Deloitte UK and ServiceNow teams helped implement an ITSM solution that could unite the IT experience with a scalable foundation for other enabling functions to build onto. Deloitte UK and ServiceNow helped the client unite teams around the world to:
Create standard ITSM processes used globally and underpinned by a single, greenfield instance of ServiceNow.
Enable an AI-powered virtual agent to provide employees with answers and information quickly, with 31% of users fully self-served through the employee portal.
Establish common ways of working, breaking down organizational silos and fostering a culture of shared information and ideas.
Speed up delivery by bringing users into the process through the cycle of prototyping, testing, and iteration, mitigating program risk before costly development efforts started.
Ensure greater visibility around the control of software and hardware assets to strengthen cybersecurity compliance by reducing the risk of breaches and system outages.
This client’s IT transformation, built on a scalable and repeatable ServiceNow foundation, has provided a blueprint for technology-enabled transformation now being extended to HR and finance. By leveraging the successful principles of executive buy-in, collaboration, and user adoption, the organization is well-positioned to achieve its strategic ambitions. This will be realized through a single, unified enterprise management platform, enabling a fit-for-future business model, better operational expenditure, and, ultimately, a stronger competitive edge.
assets migrated into one ServiceNow instance with 70k new assets discovered
reduction in Change Advisory Boards (CABs), streamlining decision-making and improving efficiency
virtual agent interactions in the first two weeks, from 2,556 individual users
stories configured in ServiceNow over a 9-month project
