BT is one of the world's leading communications services companies, serving the needs of customers in the UK and in 180 countries worldwide. Its main activities are the provision of fixed-line services, broadband, mobile and TV products and services as well as networked IT services.
Part of BT Group, BT Global provides managed network and IT infrastructure services, enabling customers' digital transformations. DigiCo is a unit within BT Global, specifically focused on driving platform-centric, data-centric approach to delivering digital and IT services.
“DigiCo was created to help revolutionise the core of BT Global’s IT infrastructure. Our vision is to create world-beating customer experiences and provide products that are delivered in an agile and flexible manner,” explains Gary Wright, Head of Design/Development - Service Management, Service Assurance, Network, Application & Experience Performance, BT.
“We were looking to create a new IT stack with a new digital experience layer that would make it easier for customers to consume our services. A key part of that was tighter integration with customers through eBonding where BT’s instance of ServiceNow would connect with the IT Service Management system of our customers,” adds Wright.
DigiCo was looking to move away from eBonding solutions previously used by BT in favour of a more plug-and-play, easy to use platform that would reduce the implementation effort for both the BT and its customers.
Delivering new efficiencies with a plug-and-play app
DigiCo selected ShareLogic’s Unifi Integration Designer to simplify and streamline integration building, resulting in significant cost savings and improved efficiencies.
“It used to take us three to four months to deliver integrations with our customers’ ticketing systems. With Unifi, we can complete them in days or even hours...”
“It used to take us three to four months to deliver integrations with our customers’ ticketing systems. With Unifi, we can complete them in days or even hours — including tasks as complicated as asynchronous messaging — which is now simplified to a checkbox,” explains Wright.
Unifi also forms an integral part of BT’s Digital Services app that has been made available to its customers via the ServiceNow Store. The app provides seamless integration with BT for incident management from customers’ ServiceNow instances.
“This simple plug-and-play app has all the functionalities required that would otherwise need to be custom developed,” explains Wright. “After installing the app, the integration with BT’s incident management is almost done, the customer just needs to complete field mapping and testing, which could be a day’s worth of work.”
With Unifi’s integration platform for ServiceNow, DigiCo has, on average, cut the time required to complete integration work and deliver BT’s REST APIs by four times.
A flexible and scalable integration solution
“BT’s vision is to make customers’ lives easy. The Unifi solution enables us to deliver good experiences to customers with the help of an easy to deploy, flexible and scalable integration solution,” explains Wright. “It has been designed from the point of view of both a customer service agent and developer.”
A golden data set (standard integration) is copied per each instance and then configured locally at the customer’s end, allowing for customisation and greater flexibility.
“From a ServiceNow administrator’s perspective, the integration is highly simplified and quick. After installing the BT plug-in, they only need to complete some basic configurations,” adds Wright.
In the past, BT’s customers had to seek additional integration expertise to help them complete local configurations, but with the availability of a golden data set, their onboarding has become much more simplified and cost-efficient.
Security was an important consideration too. The Unifi ticket exchange integration platform met BT’s requirement to keep data within the ServiceNow platform.
“Having a solution native to ServiceNow was essential for us. We upgrade the ServiceNow platform to a new release every six months and wanted to ensure the new integration solution would scale with ServiceNow,” commented Wright.
The accelerated pace of eBonding has increased the agility of BT’s digital service delivery. While eBonding used to take months, it can now be delivered rapidly to support business growth. BT is planning to roll out the new integration solution to 200 customers in the future.
Enhanced operational visibility and insights
Unifi tracks everything that happens with BT’s integrations and enhances operational visibility by storing all transactional data, processing and logs conveniently and within easy reach.
“It takes just a couple of clicks to get from an integrated record to any related HTTP request,” explains Wright. “Our operational insights are now much deeper and easily accessible.”
Our working relationship with ShareLogic has matured into a strong partnership. Its industry leading expertise and willingness to go the extra mile has set us up for long-term success in digital delivery.
“Our working relationship with ShareLogic has matured into a strong partnership. Its industry leading expertise and willingness to go the extra mile has set us up for long-term success in digital delivery,” concludes Wright.
