With a rich heritage spanning over 150 years and boasting a workforce of more than 56,000 employees, this company has solidified its position as one of the top insurance groups globally. Guided by a steadfast mission to mitigate risks and deliver unparalleled service, it consistently endeavors to provide customers with a seamless and reliable experience.
The organization opted to leverage ServiceNow’s service mapping capability to understand the interdependencies of application and infrastructure components comprising its most critical business services. However, when confronted with a myriad of technical difficulties and numerous unsuccessful attempts to deliver service maps at scale, the organization sought a strategic partner equipped with the expertise and capabilities to overcome these roadblocks. Leveraging a proven track record of success in similar endeavors, combined with extensive industry acumen, engineering prowess, and understanding across the organization’s ecosystem, Brillio emerged as the ideal partner to deliver this critical program.
The implementation began with a swift assessment of the current CMDB health and alignment to the CSDM, pinpointing areas for enhancement within the existing discovery setup and establishing owners for the agreed business critical applications. Subsequent workshops were conducted with the service owners to collect vital technical insights and entry points.
A series of enhancements to the client’s discovery capability were implemented, including changes to discovery patterns, a revised schedule, the addition of supplementary MID servers, and the enablement of Nmap capability to expedite future mapping endeavors.
With these enhancements in place, an initial first tranche of service maps were delivered for 22 critical applications. The delivered maps underwent thorough review and remediation in collaboration with service owners, addressing any necessary adjustments. By creating the maps in alignment with ServiceNow best practices, service owners can be assured of automated synchronization of mapped application services, allowing them to dynamically update as changes are made to on-premises and cloud infrastructure in the future.
The ability to demonstrate to regulators and auditors that business critical services are well-understood, documented, and their management is integrated with key IT processes is key to meeting regulatory requirements.
By establishing robust data structures and automation mechanisms, manual efforts have been substantially reduced. This efficiency is exemplified by the automatic updates to critical application service maps, ensuring they remain updated amidst changes in both on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
The implementation has empowered the organization with enhanced control and clarity over critical services, offering improved visibility to swiftly identify impacts originating from various IT service management processes. This heightened visibility enables proactive identification and mitigation of potential disruptions, bolstering operational resilience and service continuity. Additionally, by leveraging ServiceNow’s Common Service Data Model (CSDM), the organization has fortified its upgradeability and future-proofed its infrastructure, ensuring adaptability to emerging technologies and evolving business requirements.
Based on the success of the initial project, the company expanded the scope of service mapping to include all EU-based critical applications and engaged Brillio to deliver these additional maps. Additionally, in order to ensure the delivered service maps would remain up-to-date and maintained, Brillio were also requested to ensure operationalization of delivered service maps by training the client’s in-house ServiceNow capability to manage service maps as a BAU function. Training sessions were run, runbook documentation was created, and an operational model was agreed upon and implemented.
The total maps created, approved, and made production ready was increased to over 300.
As a result, the company can now map any new applications in-house, while having eliminated what would have been a significant BAU backlog. The company is now independently mapping and undertaking additional efforts to enhance data quality, consistency, and compliance with broader regulatory requirements. These efforts are based on the solid foundation of the existing Service Maps delivered by Brillio.
