Transforming airport experience with single system of record

ServiceNow has been working in the airport space for some time. Often what we find is legacy IT service management solutions. Some of the airlines in the MENA region have up to 10+ implementations of a help-desk solutions across their organisation. What we have done is immediately go in and reduce that duplication from an IT service management perspective, creating a normalised environment.

This has really come from having a single system of record. What we found with a lot of customers is having multiple records of data, and they are not able to normalise data and actually understand what they spend. And in most instances, it is kind of the backbone of cost reduction. The most aggressive roll out within an airline has been five weeks, to the maximum of about six or seven months, versus a typical 18 to 24 months projects.

In the Covid world, organisations are now working from home and they need to work in a lot more agile manner. They have a lot of collaboration tools like Slack, Teams, and Zoom. This is helping people to communicate very much in the way we are now. But what is also happening is data is getting even more distributed.

Using ServiceNow in these organisations, we are actually able to move workflows across disparate systems. We have actually seen an acceleration in this space over the last two months to the point where we are seeing a lot more companies come on board and come to us and say, help us reduce the spending.

Airports are not using ServiceNow as a deep system of record. But what the customers are working with us on is looking at how do we improve the customer experience within the airport, the passenger experience and starting to look at creating a simple way to engage with the airports when they have problems.

And that can take various forms. What we found is linking the mobile solutions into the platform and starting to drive case management. And as part of that single work-flow across the airport, what we are doing is we are linking in information that comes out of various systems. And in case management, the field service management is helping to drive customer support across the airport.

Airports want to drive down the wait time. Any negative experience needs to be recorded and managed as a case with service level agreements, so that they can at any point be able to trace that experience.

ServiceNow is that horizontal layer that makes sure all of those core systems perform at operating at the highest level. What drives the complexity here is the broad scope of services that airports provide. It is a complex business and heterogeneous environments in terms of services that they provide.

There is high complexity to maintain and to operate all of those services. ServiceNow provides the simplification to enable people to be more efficient and provide that level of service that passengers are looking for.

The complexity of an airport is not just related to how many systems there are or how complex is the network. When you are talking about an organisation as complex or heterogeneous as an airport, usually there is a huge organisational change required to make all of your policies streamlined.

So, it is not just about technology, it is also about how you re-engineer your policies and you reorganise your teams, rescale and upskill your teams so that they follow the transformation that you are doing at the technology layer.

ServiceNow is more of a horizontal layer. There is a lot of data that is being collected and a lot of data points, and at which point we have to insert ourselves. ServiceNow is being selected to serve over solutions. If we talk about a hybrid cloud strategy within an organisation, where they will have on-premises solutions, legacy implementation, and some cloud stack deployments or cloud-based services.

What ServiceNow can be for an organisation is that overarching layer to create a marketplace, whether it is for a passenger consumer, or IT consumer or business consumer. They can actually go to a certain marketplace portal, which is presented by ServiceNow and then pick from a service catalog based on entitlements, based on persona and so on.

ServiceNow will integrate from different clouds and orchestrate the different services from those different clouds. It will assist with things like metering, consolidation, consumption, policies against those cloud-based services. And then ultimately, manage the lifecycle to change the configuration management tied into it. What it does do for the end user, is it creates a single experience, and creates a seamless digital workflow across all their disparate systems.

Key takeaways

• What it does do for the end user is creates a single experience and seamless digital workflow.
• Airports are not using ServiceNow as a deep system of record.
• Airports want to drive down the wait time.
• ServiceNow is built to simplify complexity.
• Any negative experience needs to be recorded and managed as a case with service level agreements.
• ServiceNow is that horizontal layer that makes sure all of those core systems perform are operating at the highest level.
• What drives the complexity here is the broad scope of services that airports provide.
• It is a complex business and heterogeneous environments in terms of services that airports provide.