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Improving collaboration for a Nordic media power house
Egmont is a leading media group in the Nordic region, covering films, TV, cinemas, magazines, books, streaming services, educational materials, e-commerce, digital marketing services, gaming and e-support. It has interests in 30 countries and some 6,600 employees that produce high-quality content and digital innovation. It publishes 700 magazine titles, broadcasts 154 hours of TV each day, publishes 2,100 new books a year and releases one film a week. Egmont also runs its own commercial foundation which is committed to supporting initiatives that generate positive change and value for children and young people at risk.
Egmont consists of four divisions: Egmont Publishing, Egmont Books, Nordisk Film, and TV 2 in Norway. Its IT staff are based across Europe in Copenhagen, Sweden, Norway, the UK, Poland and Germany.
Challenges
Egmont had eight different service management solutions in use across the organization. One of those solutions was an on-premise solution that was reaching end of life from a support perspective. Egmont wanted to replace this with a new cloud-based solution. This would reduce the cost of infrastructure, maintenance and solution management. One of the main problems with the old solution was that it was not performing well.
Sys Mindedahl, ITSM and Process Manager, explains: “(With the old solution) we could make a cup of coffee while waiting for a response. As soon as we had more than ten users logged in at the same time, it wasn’t useable.”
Egmont decided that responsiveness was key in the search for the new solution. It also wanted to find a solution provider that would offer a good relationship and understand what it takes to drive organizational change, rather than just invoicing every time help or a change was requested. Egmont spoke to representatives from BMC and ServiceNow, before choosing to go with 4me and its partner VisionWillow.
Sys Mindedahl says that the commitment of VisionWillow to comprehensive organizational change management, coupled with the speed and responsiveness of the solution, were key factors in the selection of 4me.
Industry
- Media
Location
- Denmark (Headquarters)
Challenges
- Solution responsiveness
- Improving collaboration while maintaining autonomy
of business units - Need to deliver comprehensive change management
- Multi-country rollout across different businesses
- Need to be GDPR compliant
The other really important factor was that the different businesses within the Egmont organization were keen to maintain autonomy over their own service management solution. 4me was able to offer the same solution with strong collaboration capabilities to all of the businesses, but to give each autonomy over their own 4me environment
Sys Mindedahl explains: “Before 4me, if one business unit had to pass work to another, it would manually cut and paste it from one solution into an email and then email it to the other business unit.”
Implementation
The implementation of 4me within Egmont started in mid-August 2017 and went live on December 1st that year. It was delivered on time, within the agreed budget and within the agreed scope. In terms of processes, the deployment involved:
- Service level management
- Some configuration management (laptop, desktop, servers and applications)
- Incident management
- Request management
- Change management
Sys Mindedahl says: “Our core project team was highly engaged in the implementation, and we had staff from all over the IT organization participating. The project plan had a realistic timeframe and the milestones contained both technical elements as well as organizational/process elements, which is very important.“
Training
The Egmont project team trained specialists in a half-day session and a full-day session was held for administrators. There was side-by-side training during and directly after the go live.
Sys Mindedahl adds that it was incredibly valuable that all the initial build, testing and training were done in QA, ensuring that subscription costs were minimal before the go live.
Go Live
The rollout country by country was quick and easy and 4me enabled Egmont to standardize, process and consolidate where there were requirements for GDPR, as well as for improved information and security processes.
Egmont has been able to extend the value of some of its other solutions by integrating them with 4me. As the different business units within Egmont come onto 4me, they have access to these solutions. Integrations have now been built with AD, SCCM, SolarWinds for event management and some critical alarms tied to on-call schedules in combination with the app PagerDuty, which helped the on duty person to focus on fixing, and having a ticket assigned automatically in 4me.
Egmont recently integrated 4me with a custom SQL CRM solution, which is fed from SolarWinds. One of Egmont’s external service providers, GlobalConnect, has established an email interface between 4me and its ServiceNow instance.
Egmont has found 4me intuitive to use. Sys Mindedahl explains: “We have been impressed with how easy it is to extend the solution with Automation Rules and UI Extensions. Anyone can learn to use these capabilities quickly and without needing to have a development background.”
Solution Results
- 4me rollout was quick and easy across the Egmont businesses and different geographical locations.
- Service level management, configuration management, incident management and request management processes have all been deployed with change management due to be implemented soon.
- Integrating with 4me has extended the value of other Egmont solutions such as SCCM.
- Different business units within Egmont have been able to maintain autonomy while increasing the ability to communicate with other Egmont businesses.
- The organization is now GDPR compliant.
“We have no more on-prem maintenance. Instead, we have high performance and response times, easy implementation and the ability to maintain and develop to other branches with little help afterwards. The project was delivered on time, on budget and, best of all, with 99 percent user satisfaction – thanks to the team effort provided.”
She adds: “I would recommend 4me and VisionWillow to other firms because 4me’s approach is so very different from other service management suppliers.
“I would not even call 4me a supplier. It’s a partner and it’s a partnership that the customer signs up for, which says just about everything as to why it is different from others.”
“4me is not mainly about the features and the modules of a tool, it’s about collaboration, 4me listening to customer needs and keeping up with constant change and agile development. These elements are important for any organization that wants to be able to provide the future services that might be outside of your own core services and require collaboration, integration and automation across vendors and customers.”
Sys Mindedahl, Egmont
