Australian Payments Plus continues "operating model harmonisation"

Australian Payments Plus has set up ServiceNow as a single central platform for IT and customer service management and enterprise risk management.

The company, which brings together BPAY Group, eftpos and NPP Australia, initially decided to run ServiceNow as “one single unified digital front door for IT”.

“As we went about that implementation, we realised there were other parts of our business that had similar needs to us,” head of service management Lorna Brown told a recent ServiceNow AI summit in Melbourne.

“So we actually extended our implementation [of ServiceNow] to cover risk and customer service management [as well].”

Both eftpos and BPAY Group were previously using ServiceNow for IT service management when they became part of Australian Payments Plus, albeit they had their own separate instances and configurations.

Brown said that setting up a single AP+ ServiceNow instance, as well as “one defined AP+ way” of working, was important to the organisation being able to achieve operational excellence.

“The main focus wasn't actually the technology: it was actually being able to harmonise multiple organisations with their cultures, the different processes, and their actual different tolerances for risk,” she said.

“It was about trying to set ourselves up for success in the future.”

A centre of excellence was set up to develop enterprise-wide processes and process maturity, and to pursue “operating model harmonisation.”

This work is continuing, with a current focus on improving employee experience and driving adoption of standard processes, underpinned by the standard tooling.

“We were initially up against really tight deadlines that were being driven by contract end dates across various different [service management] platforms [we ran], and so early on, some of our design decisions were not necessarily pragmatic,” Brown said.

“We've now come to a point of stabilisation and the creation of a platform roadmap. 

“We've [also] now actually introduced a work stream dedicated to total experience so that we can really focus on improving experience and adoption.”