The situation
The client runs data centres across several countries for enterprise and hyperscale tenants. Service requests, incidents and physical access arrived through a mix of email, spreadsheets and two older ticketing tools, depending on the site. Access cards for engineers and tenant staff were requested on a form, approved by email and issued by hand, which took days and left no reliable audit trail.
Site teams were spending their time chasing status rather than resolving work, and tenant satisfaction surveys said so.
What we did
We started with the process, not the platform. Over three weeks of workshops with site operations, security and the tenant service desk we agreed one incident model, one request catalog and one approval model for physical access, and wrote down what “done” meant for each.
Then we implemented ServiceNow ITSM with:
- Incident and request management on a single CMDB, with site, hall and rack modelled so impact and routing were automatic.
- A Service Catalog covering the requests that made up most of the volume, including access cards, remote hands, cross-connects and tenant onboarding, each with Flow Designer fulfilment and approvals.
- Agent Workspace for the service desk and site teams, so one screen showed the ticket, the tenant, the CI and the knowledge.
- Knowledge bases for engineers and for tenants, with a Service Portal for tenant self-service and status tracking.
- Migration from the two legacy tools, with a short overlap and a hard cutover per site.
What changed
Incident resolution time fell by 70 percent across the sites in the first two quarters after go-live, mostly because routing and impact were now automatic and the knowledge was in front of the engineer. Access-card processing time fell by 52 percent, and every card issued now has an approval and an audit record.
The client’s service desk uses the same platform for tenant service today, and the catalog has grown to cover most of what tenants ask for.
