Flying through cloud: Helicopter firm Bristow says ServiceNow ITSM has elevated levels of service

'We've freed up the capacity to deliver,' Adil Ahmed, director of information architecture and knowledge systems, tells Computing

Deploying IT service management (ITSM) tools by ServiceNow has helped British offshore helicopter transport services firm Bristow Group grow as a company while also allowing IT staff to focus on higher value activities instead of administrative tasks.

That's what Adil Ahmed, director of information architecture and knowledge systems at Bristow Group, told Computing at ServiceNow's Knowledge 15 user conference in Las Vegas.

The aviation services company has over 4,000 employees across the globe and operates in more than 20 countries, providing transport to oil and gas companies along with search and rescue services.

Ahmed described how, three years ago, senior management set out plans to grow the company, a strategy that required "putting the right information systems in place to support growth in the future".

"There were three components to that as far as IT is concerned. There was putting in the right infrastructure to support the growth, putting in the right set of enterprise applications to support the growth, and building the right organisation to drive these business processes," he explained, adding that a service management platform was key to the transformation.

"We came from a place where we didn't have any industry-standard practices for things like incident management or change management, so we were essentially in a greenfield situation in terms of ideas in the space," Ahmed said.

Bristow Group opted to deploy ServiceNow's enterprise service management tools to support the transformation of the business, mainly because of recommendations from system integration partners. Ahmed also said the prospect of fast project turnaround times was a reason for selection.

"One of the attractive features of using ServiceNow was time to market. The fact that we could plan and execute an initial service management project within a matter of a couple of months," he explained.

"The whole idea of software being delivered as a cloud service was certainly attractive to us in that sense, primarily because of the speed at which it could be delivered," Ahmed added.

Since deploying ServiceNow for human resources, fleet management and services management three years ago, Bristow Group has benefited in a number of areas.

"The number one most important benefit is the fact that we went towards an ITSM framework. The maturity of the IT organisation in terms of its ability to deliver services increased significantly," Ahmed told Computing. "The whole process of training, educating and executing ITSM practices elevated our competencies as an IT organisation."

As a cloud-based platform, ServiceNow has also helped Bristow to achieve its goal of significant growth.

"It helped us get to a point where we can scale up as and when needed. In the last three years our company has grown significantly in revenue as well as head count, so we were positioning the IT organisation to support that growth," Ahmed said.

The system is easy to use so was quickly adopted by employees, he explained.

"It required very little formal end-user training. We worked on the principle that the software solution that we build should be intuitive enough for people to adopt," he said.

"You do more ad hoc engagement when people ask questions on certain topics, from which people are going to learn. We were able to deploy these solutions with very minimal end user training."

Ahmed said that Bristow Group has "a strong relationship with ServiceNow" and that the cloud strategy it offers is easy "because you have more control over when you upgrade and how you upgrade".

Since deploying ServiceNow, Bristow Group IT staff have been able to move away from providing basic services to finding new ways to drive innovation and efficiency.

"As an internal service provider, you want to focus on the higher value activities; you want to be close to the business and delivering the solutions the business needs," Ahmed said.

"Not having the application teams focus on infrastructure as much allows us to free up that capacity to deliver on those tasks. To me that's where the benefit lies," he said.

In an earlier interview at Knowledge 15, Harley-Davidson systems manager for global information services Jim Keene told Computing how the motorcycle manufacturer chose ServiceNow over IBM or BMC and liberated IT.