This financial services organisation is a leading provider of banking, general insurance, life insurance and wealth management solutions in Australia and New Zealand.
Self-service through automation
As a diversified, simplified, low-risk financial services group, it creates value for customers through a portfolio of market-leading brands, using efficiencies of scale as a large organisation to deliver both high yield and above system growth. Its organic growth strategy is based exclusively in Australia and New Zealand.
As part of the organisation’s broader digital transformation project, DXC Technology’s ServiceNow practice delivered two projects focused on the uplift of user adoption of the IT self-service portal and regulatory compliance. These independent projects were completed concurrently with strong collaboration between the financial services organisation, DXC and ServiceNow teams to deliver significant benefits.
The financial services organisation had previously implemented an out-of-the-box IT portal to enable self-service through automation. But user adoption was poor, and service desk personnel couldn’t keep up with the high demands for support.
This drove the need for a next-generation portal that would satisfy around 20,000 internal users with fast and easy IT service access while significantly reducing the existing IT service desk and administrative burden.
The second project was initiated in response to mandatory requirements set down by The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA). The new CPS 234 regulation specifies that all regulated finance and insurance entities must have systems and protocols that allow for manual and automatic logging of risk events; automatic notification of these events; and preparation of data and other analysis required to notify APRA within 24 hours of a security incident.
This increase in audit and reporting requirements meant the spreadsheet system previously used by the financial services organisation was no longer viable.
Improve digital support
In the first project, DXC took a holistic approach in the redesign to address all factors that impact user adoption before implementing a next generation ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) Portal. The goal was to improve IT self-service with automated organisation-wide access to IT services that users might normally contact the IT service desk for and remove frictions that prevent users from completing self-service tasks.
For the second project, DXC implemented the ServiceNow Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) solution. This project focused on one topic area (CPS 234 compliance) and included defining and setting up necessary controls, risk libraries and obligations.
As a broader objective, the team ensured this same functionality could be easily extended to other regulatory obligations in the future.
The GRC solution provided a control library for effective management of compliance with APRA policy statements related to cyber security (CPS 234).
Addressing the employee experience
For the IT Portal, DXC worked closely with ServiceNow project managers and the organisation’s system administration team to initially develop an action plan to address adoption issues.
This was quickly turned into wireframes, followed by high-quality screen mock-ups used in the final design.
John Shen from DXC Technology said, “The wireframe approach helps focus conversations on conceptual questions that should be addressed first and provides necessary early feedback to ensure success that is crucial to these types of projects.
"The financial services organisation was very happy with what DXC initially proposed so we were able to quickly move on to producing mock-ups for final design.”
To avoid struggles with user adoption, the DXC team looked at all affected areas to ensure the new approach focused on improving the interface design and resulting user experience.
The GRC solution provided a control library for effective management of compliance with APRA policy statements related to cyber security (CPS 234). The organisation’s user group consists of technology data laboratories, some GRC risk and compliance managers and service owners.
DXC’s work included implementing the ServiceNow platform as well as setting up base content so risks could be managed with more confidence. Michael Godec from DXC said, “It was like a turnkey pack. We spent time with the financial services organisation determining what was applicable, scoping out which applications needed controls, and developing a monitoring and content pack. This will allow us to very easily expand this same functionality to other regulatory obligations as necessary.”
Both projects relied on very high levels of collaboration. A spokesperson from the financial services organisation said, “It was great to see the three teams come together to demonstrate the extent of their capabilities.”
DXC took a holistic approach to completely redesign the portal user experience (UX) design strategy in order to increase user adoption, optimise usability and productivity and remove previous pain points.
Keys to success
DXC conducted comprehensive usability assessments and analysis on the previous portal to identify frictions and understand why users were still contacting the service desk instead of self-serving. Problems stemmed from poor user experience, difficulties navigating the solution to quickly find services and workflow issues.
Based on this research, DXC took a holistic approach to completely redesign the portal user experience (UX) design strategy in order to increase user adoption, optimise usability and productivity and remove previous pain-points.
Inclusion of unique portal elements addressed specific user problems and enhanced usability (custom taxonomy and navigation); content quality (forms, articles, tickets, email); accessibility (entry points); language (for easy location of items/services) and human interaction/socialisation (chat) in the new portal.
The solution also offered enhanced presentation of submitted tickets to provide critical information and progress status, which was previously missing. Email notifications were also improved to provide additional entry points and facilitate a seamless transition from email to portal.
Cross-browser support removed users’ technical frictions, improved branding and provided a more consistent and end-to-end user experience.
In addition, upon rollout of the new solution, DXC ensured users were well socialised with the key benefits of the new IT portal to encourage the fast adoption of a self-service mindset.
With the GRC, the project team explored opportunities for compliance automation before setting up the foundation for CPS 234 APRA compliance. DXC spent time with the organisation’s relevant subject matter experts, while also leveraging its own prebuilt GRC solution (a suite of pre-populated, best-practice and industry-aligned CPS 234 content packs).
Applying this intellectual property (IP) allows customers to move from reactive, siloed and inefficient manual processes to an automated, actionable and proactive GRC program very quickly — with implementation typically taking weeks, rather than months.
The entire design, discovery, configuration and build process was a collaborative effort involving DXC, ServiceNow and the organisation’s risk and compliance management, technology data laboratories and key business users.
DXC started out with baseline content and a standard set of controls, ensuring it was configured and defined in wording that made sense to end users and application owners.
This process, as well as the configuration of workflows and data capture, was all completed in conjunction with the financial services organisation. The entire project took around 11 weeks, with front-end client workshops taking 3 to 4 weeks and the build process 7 to 8 weeks.
“We see this project as being very successful and a great improvement to the user experience.”
ServiceNow Delivery Manager Employee Experience, Financial services organisation
High user adoption
In both projects, the financial services organisation, DXC and ServiceNow teams came together to leverage each other’s capabilities and deliver excellent results.
The next-generation IT portal has significantly uplifted user adoption on the organisation’s ServiceNow platform. By maximising value for the end users, it has encouraged the organisation’s employees to embrace the self-service mindset and more modern ways of working. This has led to reduced demand for service desk support, increased speed for IT service provisioning, and improved employee experience.
The previous portal had little design consideration and the high volume of emails and calls to the service desk were problematic and unsustainable. The new portal has significantly improved the employee experience, removed IT service desk and administrative burdens, and increased speed of IT service delivery.
User adoption levels are very high, with employees feeling empowered to self-serve effectively and productively, giving them additional time to focus on more important tasks.
In addition, the financial services organisation’s IT department is now empowered to take on downstream activities on quality content creation through improved knowledge transfer, new portal usability assessment and increased understanding of how to collect user feedback.
This approach will continue to improve the portal to accommodate changing business needs. The ServiceNow Delivery Manager, Employee Experience for the financial services organisation at the time of the project, said, “We see this project as being very successful and a great improvement to the user experience.”
The GRC solution helped the organisation move from manual to digital processes while ensuring compliance with APRA CPS 234 and improving user confidence during audits.
Continuous monitoring and real-time dashboards provide users with actionable information about high risk areas, non-compliance, vendor status and significant audit findings. It also helped teams identify previous control gaps for immediate remediation while improved visibility and transparency of controls has increased board‑level confidence.
The financial services organisation’s IT department is now empowered to take on downstream activities on quality content creation through improved knowledge transfer, new portal usability assessment and increased understanding of how to collect user feedback.
Looking to the future
As more users access the new portal, service desk support demands will continue to decrease. DXC, working with the financial services organization, will continue to assess the portal’s usability to identify further improvements as well as the potential for additional digital transformation of the organisation’s existing HR and finance portals.
With the GRC, there is an opportunity to focus on other regulatory assurance areas, leveraging the existing IP and development work. The workflows developed for the solution will support a broader supplier framework.
A spokesperson from the financial services organisation said, “Facing into APRA CPS 234 presented a fantastic opportunity to bring this GRC system to life. The framework developed by DXC and the experience offered in delivering this project marks the start of a journey as this organisation works on becoming a completely compliance-focused organisation over the next 6 to 12 months.”