Law firm Addleshaw Goddard (AG) has selected cloud service management provider ServiceNow to automate its IT service delivery functions ahead of offerings from CA, BMC and ICCM.
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The move to IT service management was due to the law firm not meeting the required services level, and was part of a broader transformation project in IT, according to AG's head of IT, John Whitlow.
"One of the things we are tackling is a service quality issue, which came from having a reduction of staff over the last few years due to the economic challenges. We didn't adapt our service to cope and we tried to do the same with less people, resulting in us delivering poorer service," he told Computing.
The firm wanted an IT platform that could meet its current and future requirements rather than having a solution to which the business would have to adapt.
AG began researching potential solutions in December 2011 by looking at what other specialist options for the legal sector were available. But according to Whitlow, none of these were "world class" so the firm looked instead at analyst and market reports.
"We started at the top of the list, and didn't preclude anything," he said.
Whitlow explained that AG reviewed products from HP, Nimsoft, Microsoft and its incumbent Hornbill's current offering, but none of these made the shortlist. The final four were: ServiceNow, ICCM, CA and BMC.
"ServiceNow was a clear winner; many solutions that ticked the box weren't a cloud offering but functional and non-functional requirements. The clincher was that ServiceNow is a true software-as-a-service offering, and from a user perspective it scored 20 per cent above the others in their product reviews," he said.
The RFP was completed in February this year and thereafter there were four weeks of commercial negotiations. The implementation then began with ServiceNow creating a development environment within two days, and then taking six weeks to complete the implementation, which included the incident and problem management module and a configuration management database (CMDB).