Moving to the cloud with ServiceNow has allowed the IT departments of Service Stream and Echo Entertainment Group to save costs and improve work efficiencies.
Speaking at Gartner’s IT Infrastructure Operations and Data Centre summit in Sydney, Service Stream CIO Craig Wishart told delegates that its field service management system was moved into the cloud in 2012.
The company is made up of three business units - fixed communications, mobile communications and utilities networks. Within Service Stream, the cloud platform is called Essential.
“We do a lot of National Broadband Network [NBN] field service delivery work where people go to your house and make sure you’re connected to the NBN,” he said.
“When we looked at the way it was run, this was done via spreadsheets and call centres. Contractors would wait to be called.”
A decision was made to host the field service management system in the cloud and start a ticketed work system. Contractors are now delivered their work to their mobile device. Service Stream staff can also see when the job has been opened by the contractor.
“In four weeks’ time we will go live with our first Essential utilities company and run field service management and stock serialisation through the cloud platform,” Wishart said.
“In the context of the NBN when we install a battery on your premise, we know that in 11 months it needs to be fixed and we can trigger a workflow document to generate that work request back through the system.”
Wishart anticipates that over the next six months Service Stream will bring the mobile communications business onto the Essential cloud platform.
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Echo Entertainment
Since shifting data to ServiceNow’s cloud platform, Echo Entertainment Group’s IT department has been able to focus on delivering services to the business. The company operates casinos in NSW and Queensland.
Echo Entertainment CTO Rob James told delegates that cloud computing was the right decision as it is in the business of managing casinos, not data centres.
“We had a lot of pressure to cut costs and be more efficient so we started to look at a lot of the commodity systems which could be managed by the experts,” he said.
James added that the IT department is now considering moving applications which use legacy platforms onto a cloud platform.
He added that people need to “get over” issues with data sovereignty and start using the cloud to reduce costs and IT workloads.
“The cloud is here to stay and I think within five years most of our data is going to end up in the cloud."
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