Danske Bank unlocks value and spurs innovation with ServiceNow

Extending corporate values and fostering innovation and growth for stakeholders, customers, and society
Danske Bank is a 145-year-old Danish bank with strong ties around the world. With its roots firmly in the Nordics, Danske Bank is committed to serving personal as well as business and institutional customers.

Delivering competitive financial solutions through deep knowledge, skills, and technology is one of Danske Bank’s core values, as is challenging existing procedures and behaviours.

Continuous innovation of new products and services is core to Danske Bank’s strategy. The need to establish a scalable and flexible enterprise platform to support this innovation became apparent when the use of highly complex and fragmented legacy systems started to hinder agile innovation.

“Our IT service management was built on siloed tools, with elements such as case management run by one platform and knowledge management run by another solution,” says Jacob Elfving, Development Manager, IT Operations at Danske Bank.

ServiceNow enables complete visibility and better decision-making
“ServiceNow offers a platform that removes inefficiencies and gives us significantly better control and visibility,” says Jacob. “We also dramatically improve our internal customer experience when interacting with IT—reinforcing our corporate values of being helpful and supportive towards colleagues.”

By eliminating information silos with one data source and bringing IT service management onto one platform, Danske Bank has gained a single system of record for IT.

“Our service management used to be an inefficient patchwork of data, processes, and tools,” says Jacob. “The Now Platform gives us complete visibility of our infrastructure and services, with complete control over our service management approach. This means better insights and more robust business decision-making.”

Danske Bank’s configuration management database (CMDB) has been enhanced and enriched through service mapping, which enables applications to become service aware by automatically detecting and identifying the causes of service disruptions.

A heightened level of control and governance has been achieved through an integrated risk management programme, which helps ensure rapid identification and response to risks. The median time required to restore services has been reduced by 79% and the volume of high-priority incidents has decreased by 93%.

“This includes our asset management for automatic provisioning of assets, which is now embedded into our digital workflows,” adds Jacob.

Improved user experience and collaboration through ServiceNow-based portal
A new self-service portal had been on the Service Desk agenda for some time and the bank ultimately launched the new portal with ServiceNow.

“Our primary goal was to improve and simplify the user experience, both when reporting incidents and searching for information,” says Jacob. “In the original portal, four category and subcategory levels generated an immeasurable number of classifications making it difficult for the user to navigate within the portal. We have now reduced the number to approximately 250 covering IT, business procedures, and development support.”

The adoption rate of the new portal among employees exceeded all expectations–90% within 2 weeks–and statistics show that the users are satisfied and empowered by the new self-help solution when it comes to reporting incidents and finding knowledge.

“Secondly, we needed to reduce legacy customisation,” says Jacob. “The former portal was virtually impossible to update. Going forward, it will be a lot easier to maintain with minimal manual effort. In addition, we can use the new features offered by the Now Platform.”

He adds that this launch not only enhances the experience and satisfaction of employees, but also now enables Danske Bank to move towards an enterprise-wide portal—which was not possible with the previous toolset.

ServiceNow enables Danske Bank to innovate faster
Making the most of the advanced, out-of-the-box capabilities of the Now Platform has helped Danske Bank create new efficiencies and spur greater innovation.

“ServiceNow is at the forefront of industry innovation, including DevOps, AIOps, service mapping, and agent workspace,” says Jacob. “We at Danske Bank are becoming more agile and leveraging the benefits of industry best practices, such as the IT4IT framework. ServiceNow can help us on that journey by supporting our increasing adoption of the platform’s capabilities to implement new digital workflows. This will create new opportunities to continuously save time and effort.”

Jacob adds: “We see ServiceNow as the industry standard, so our approach is to review our old processes and standardise on the new platform, rather than embark on customisations that are typically expensive and inflexible in the long run.”

Security operations is another area Danske Bank is pursuing in order to consolidate security data and processes in one environment. ServiceNow allows for automation of the remediation, as well as precise measurements of the efficiency of security processes. Danske Bank expects this to increase the efficiency of these processes. Ultimately, linking security processes to operation processes will enable a better cross-organisational collaboration.

From an IT management perspective, Danske Bank is reviewing the adoption of the IT4IT Reference Architecture. “The Now Platform is one of the few solutions to support the IT4IT value chain-based operating model that is key to us,” comments Jacob.

Danske Bank unlocks new value by scaling the Now Platform across the enterprise
Since its introduction, ServiceNow has become a strategic enterprise platform for Danske Bank, enabling the organisation to manage data, services, and risk efficiently, while creating better experiences for employees.

“We have unlocked significant value by scaling the Now Platform across the organisation,” explains Jacob. “It is our backbone, underpinning all future implementations, integrations, and innovation. We are planning integrations with HR and also exploring ServiceNow^® Customer Service Management and ServiceNow^® Security Operations.”

Jacob concludes, “Regardless of our specific plans and initiatives, we know that with ServiceNow we have a platform that can continuously support Danske Bank in realising its vision to create value for customers, employees, shareholders, and the societies of which we are a part.”

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