Scott McGarvey, Head of IT Service Management, CYBG

I recently came across an amusing cartoon by Marketoonist where a digital transformation expert is aiming to present via a conference call. Because the other party on the call is unable to view his slides (on digital transformation), they ask him to fax the presentation across. While exaggerated and comical, the cartoon stems from a nugget of truth.

Digital transformation is often still a buzzword that people struggle to implement in reality. Why? Because challenging the status quo, changing people’s mindsets and kick-starting organisational change is difficult.

It’s even more so the case in the financial services industry and in legacy banks, and that includes CYBG plc, owner of Clydesdale Bank, Yorkshire Bank, Virgin Money UK and digital banking service, B.

Becoming a challenger bank

At CYBG, we are on a journey to becoming a digitally-savvy banking group. Both Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banks improved the mobile banking experience last year and the group has implemented a more agile development cycle throughout the organisation. At the heart of our quest to become a true national competitor to the status quo is a major Service Transformation programme, focused on improving the customer experience and driving a Digital Workplace initiative.

To date, we have learned that implementing digital workflows and processes, running on an intuitive platform that is designed to handle high volumes of change, is absolutely essential on this journey.

One platform to ‘get things done’

The ServiceNow platform underpins our Service Transformation programme. In just six months, we’ve transformed our IT service delivery approach to generate almost immediate operational efficiencies, which gave us confidence in the continued enterprise roll out.

We’ve created a powerful self-service portal that allows 6,000+ users to do much more than simply log incidents. They can reset passwords, track requests, see updates on service status and queries, and choose applications from a service catalogue.

Digital workflows streamline the processing and management of requests and incidents and accelerate approvals, which saves time for our team and enhances the user experience.

We have also been able to completely change the way people work with IT, reducing the number of interactions with the service desk. It’s empowering our staff with more time to perform daily service reviews and put a greater focus on SLA-driven processes.

Most importantly, we can now focus on continual service improvement activity, value creation and delivery. Greater staff efficiency also means we can support CYBG’s growth and tap into the talent within our team, without hiring extra people.

An exciting journey of transformation

It became clear very quickly that the Now Platform is so much more than a service desk enabler.

We are only half-way through our complex and exciting journey and we are looking beyond IT service management to incorporate ServiceNow into all our services and applications. The platform’s support for technologies, such as virtual agents, machine learning and mobile clients to support a BYOD/ virtual working policy, will only serve to accelerate our plans.

In ServiceNow, we’ve created a strategic platform to enable and support our digital transformation. Change does not have to be as difficult as many people think it is.

You can read more about the CYBG journey with ServiceNow here. For other customer stories please view our customer page, and to view our online publication Workflow, where you can find all the latest and greatest stories about people and technology at work please use this link.