Rest Super simplifies staff access to IT, HR and information

Rest Super has set up ServiceNow as a “front door” for employees to get information and to engage with internal functions such as IT and HR, under a multi-year transformation of its operations.

ServiceNow platform manager Glenn Jones told a recent summit in Melbourne that the superannuation fund undertook “a complete transformation of how we operate within the organisation”, coinciding with a period of growth.

“Rest has been on a really big journey over the last probably three-to-five years,” Jones said.

“There were 200 people working for the organisation about five years ago and now we're at around 1100 people with contractors and employees.

“We've insourced a lot of capability and we're really looking at how we can scale the organisation.”

The superannuation fund is using ServiceNow to simplify its operations, starting initially with “the generally safe space of IT service management and IT operations management”, before branching out into integrated risk management and HR service delivery.

The integrated risk management focus is aligned in part to compliance efforts around prudential standards CPS 230 and CPS 234, making it easier to track and report compliance and risk.

Jones said that every application built on top of ServiceNow benefits from reusable patterns that makes the applications both faster to deploy and familiar to end users.

“Every application we deploy on top is becoming quicker and quicker and quicker for the business as well, because we've built all the foundation that is needed,” Jones said.

Running more of its operations through ServiceNow has simplified management and access by end users as well.

“I think that the key outcome for us has really been about providing that ‘front door’ that people are used to, especially employees, so they know where to go for information, they know where to go to raise requests for IT, they know how to engage with HR, they know how to to do all their daily work,” Jones said.

Meeting audit requirements is simpler, removing a lot of information gathering and collation effort.

“We are still relatively early in the journey, but we're starting to get a lot of that reporting capability and the ability for us to quickly respond to APRA or other auditors when we need to,” Jones said.

“It all leads to less friction for us. We have clear ownership, [and] we have [a] common data model which applies across the platform that really allows us to be able to provide a lot of that value through the business.”

The fund is increasingly turning its attention to AI and automation use cases, both inside and outside of the ServiceNow platform.

“We've made some pretty big bets early on with AI. [We’re] throwing a lot of products at the wall to see what sticks, and really leaving it up to the organisation to find a lot of those use cases and the things that work for us [and] that don't work for us,” Jones said.

“We've had some really, really good success with the general adoption of general AI capabilities within the organisation.

“From an organisational perspective, we've [also] just set up a centre of excellence internally to really have a bit of a grassroots approach to AI and look at it use case by use case.”