MediaWorks is New Zealand’s (NZ) leading radio, outdoor advertising and interactive media company. The company has several mobile-first radio websites and services, including a 24/7 streaming app, where NZ radio stations stream live content and feature podcasts. The company has over 2.5 million weekly listeners and over 5,000 outdoor touchpoints nationwide.
“We didn’t just want a vendor to implement ServiceNow and walk away. That’s where DXC excelled - we wanted added value through ongoing managed services and the ability to sustain a long-term relationship to support us through our journey beyond implementation.”
Robert Parlane Technology Support Supervisor, MediaWorks
The MediaWorks portfolio includes premium digital and static billboards, key transit media including buses and the Auckland digital commuter network, and experiential opportunities to provide clients and agency partners with engaging, impactful and innovative advertising solutions across an outdoor media network.
Business challenge
MediaWorks was divesting its television rights and working through a significant business separation project. Its incumbent IT Service Management (ITSM) tool had reached its end of life, so the company decided to review systems capable of supporting the organisation’s fast-paced growth in alignment with strategic priorities.
The review focused on browser-based service management software that could be delivered “as a service”. MediaWorks wanted a modern, futureproof and cloud-based ITSM solution that would allow complete automation of the service desk, accelerate resolution for internal customers, and free in-house IT resources to concentrate on innovation. The solution needed to provide functionality focused on customer needs - allowing selfservice issue resolution and access from anywhere to resolve high-impact incidents and improve agent efficiency and productivity.
It should also facilitate growth into a complete Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) managed environment; with the added capability to develop a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) for full visibility of IT assets.
There was an eight-week window to define processes and build an efficient new ITSM solution with the go-live date driven by the impending separation.
Solution
ServiceNow was selected following a comprehensive product evaluation. Mediaworks then brought DXC Technology’s Practice for ServiceNow on board to help implement the solution, and provide ongoing managed service. DXC was chosen for its extensive experience with the ServiceNow platform, backed up by recommendations from several organisations in the region, and MediaWorks’ exposure to DXC’s work through previous projects.
According to Robert Parlane, Technology Support Supervisor for MediaWorks “We didn’t just want a vendor to implement ServiceNow and walk away. That’s where DXC excelled - we wanted added value through ongoing managed services and the ability to sustain a long-term relationship to support us through our journey beyond implementation.”
An accelerated workstream was essential, with DXC to complete most of the work independently to provide the initial ticketing system for incident requests and fulfilment.
Implementation
With a fast-tracked timeline due to the impending business separation, and limited internal resources available, Mediaworks relied on the DXC team to run the ServiceNow implementation and deliver on time.
Parlane said “DXC listened to what we wanted and recommended the best way forward. The team helped us understand that we didn’t need customisation - implementing out-of-the-box meant a faster implementation, but it has also resulted in the best approach. As a result, we don’t have any unnecessary business processes, and automatic upgrades work beautifully. We also don’t need someone to make it work every time there’s an update.
“The DXC team was very understanding of our situation. This was a critical project for our company, but the DXC team was great at communicating from the start.”
Results and benefits
The initial ServiceNow ITSM implementation for the IT and Technology departments was completed within a tight timeline of seven weeks, including training, live incident and asset data migration.
Since then, DXC has supported several enhancements to the incident, change and agile development modules. With a goal to eliminate repetitive tasks and achieve automation so staff can spend more time on new initiatives, functionality has been expanding to include outage and incident management, with problem management also part of the new solution.
The positive business impacts include time savings, convenience, and significantly improved field information. Mediaworks now has a mature incident and request fulfilment system, with a set of workflows and tools for optimum development, delivery and management of IT services.
Key functionality includes:
- Delivery of resilient IT services on a single ITSM cloud platform.
- A boost in IT agent productivity with faster platform-native AI resolutions and elimination of many manual processes.
- The ability to serve employees anywhere (including field engineers) with always-on IT services (including where mobile access is unavailable - company assets can still be accessed, information entered, with databases updated once they’re back online).
- The capacity to serve employees 1:1 and improve satisfaction with “genius bar” IT service.
- Triage, collaboration and enablement for agents to resolve incidents, find answers, and stay connected from anywhere.
- Automation of request fulfilment with employees empowered to self-solve issues 24/7, raise questions, and get relevant, accurate, and consistent information in a single place. This has freed up the time of two support technicians to focus on service delivery and identification of other value-add opportunities to streamline processes using ServiceNow as the backbone.
- The capacity to identify, track, and resolve high-impact incidents and improve agent efficiency.
- Workforce and process optimisation to maximise team productivity while improving processes with a 360-view of agent work, schedule, skills and training and better insight into bottlenecks.
The cloud-based approach has also removed any maintenance and upgrade burden. According to Parlane, “DXC challenged our belief that we needed customisations, helping us achieve our necessary fast deployment with very little input from my team.
Many things were keeping me awake at night during the separation activities, but DXC looking after ServiceNow was not one of them. We are all new to ServiceNow and post go-live, the DXC team has been knowledgeable, approachable, and a general pleasure to deal with. I feel like they’re equally as excited for our journey as we are, which is very reassuring.”
“DXC’s ability to move quickly meant we improved ServiceNow adoption rates, highlighting opportunities to consider onboarding further areas of the business. I am extremely happy with DXC and heard nothing but positive feedback from the team involved in the project.“
The future
With DXC providing ongoing managed services, regular service reviews were established from day one. A solid working relationship was developed with DXC offering MediaWorks fast resolution of any issues.
Mediaworks always planned to implement ServiceNow with the required functionality to meet the separation deadline, then grow it over time. DXC is facilitating growth into a fully ITIL managed environment with the development of a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to consolidate IT data silos into a single system of record for complete visibility of IT assets and related services. It also provides the ability to see the relationships of configuration items (CIs) and services to proactively manage the change impacts. With a raft of bespoke radio transmission equipment in the field, this functionality will ensure field technicians fully understand what a device is and what it affects – to support improved repair and maintenance decisions.
DXC continues to provide extended functionality and optimised IT efficiencies, including evaluating ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) to improve asset visibility (particularly in the field). This work will help Mediaworks build a more agile and monitored solution with automated scans to maintain database currency for up-to-date understanding of infrastructure and devices across the whole environment.