Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank Group uses ServiceNow to support transformation

Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank Group is to deploy ServiceNow to speed up changes to production software to support its digital transformation initiative.

The bank’s goal is to transform customer service, raise productivity levels and enhance service delivery capabilities.

Speaking to Computer Weekly, Scott McGarvey, head of IT service management at Clydesdale Bank, said digital transformation means that the rate of change IT must support doubles every two years because of DevOps.

“IT service management is no longer the gatekeeper,” he said. “A lot of collaboration between delivery and service is needed to decide on an operating model.

“Using ServiceNow, we are bringing in a new framework. We will have KPIs [key performance indicators] for time, speed and cost and we will measure speed and time to market and how long it takes to get a change into production.”

Discussing the benefits of ServiceNow, McGarvey said: “ServiceNow gives us flexibility to adapt processes. It is modular and content-driven.”

This allows the ITSM team to focus on how to improve individual aspects of software development and deployment across different teams, he said. For example, there may be a need to deploy a certain project through DevOps every day.

“We need to build up a track record of how well the team is performing,” he said. ServiceNow is used to collect this data and to measure quality assurance.

The bank worked with TeamUltra, a Computacenter company, on the ServiceNow implementation. A pilot implementation was ready within eight weeks, and the bank plans to start phase one of the ServiceNow roll-out within the next few months.

The company plans to operate a maturity model, using automated testing tools to incentivise teams to deploy software changes more quickly.

Asked how he plans to measure the success of the project, McGarvey said: “Success for me will be to have continuous service improvement embedded in the business.”

This will be part of the second phase of the deployment. Over time, McGarvey hopes he will be able to have conversations with the business about how ServiceNow could be deployed in other departments.

Using ITSM across the business is one of the initiatives ServiceNow tends to promote. As Computer Weekly has reported previously, Scottish Water used ServiceNow to optimise its joiners and leavers HR process.