The roots of ITIL are in IT service management (ITSM). However, many organizations have found that the tenets of the ITIL framework lend themselves to business functions beyond ITSM. Equinor is one such company.
Equinor, formerly known as Statoil, is a Norwegian state-backed energy company. Founded in 1972, it currently employs 22 000 people in 35 countries. Equinor exports electricity to over 600 000 UK householders, is established in the USA, and is building a strong portfolio in South America. While it ships 2.1 billion barrels of oil per day and is the second biggest gas supplier to Europe, Equinor is also investing heavily in renewable sources of energy, including hydro, solar and wind. Equinor long ago adopted ITIL within its IT services. However, they recently took it a stage further, adapting ITIL to assist in the management of their back office functions.
Equinor has a shared service organization, Equinor Global Business Services (GBS), which is responsible for IT, HR, finance, facilities management, HSE and project deliveries for the Equinor Group. To give a sense of the scale of its operation, Equinor GBS runs 130 services across the business, handles more than 700 000 incoming incidents or requests from Equinor users per year, works with 600 vendors to serve 40 000 users, and has 1500 employees. To complicate matters, more than 70 per cent of Equinor production is in external hands, and the company works with global suppliers such as Cap Gemini, HCL, CGI and Accenture to deliver services around the world.
With such a large scale operation, and the fluctuation in oil prices in recent years, Equinor needed to rationalize its services to reduce costs and improve efficiency for its end users. To do this, it turned to ITIL.
1.1 SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Erik Dahl is Vice President of GBS. His team works continually to improve GBS’s back office functions, transforming them from business functions to re-usable services through the adoption of ITIL principles. Erik explained:
The core service management principles are proving to be transportable across the business and have permeated every department in the organization, bringing capabilities such as automation, workflow, and machine learning. The ServiceNow platform Equinor GBS uses provides a set of business applications for enterprise services such as IT service management, IT operations management, IT business management, HR service management, security management and customer service management, and presents a collection of platform capabilities which can be configured to support other services.
The combination of an overarching set of ITIL principles and a unifying technology platform has enabled Equinor GBS to standardize processes and deliver a holistic solution for its users.
Drilling at Johan Sverdup field
1.2 A NEW APPROACH
Erik was previously the Director of the IT department, which is where he first came across ITIL:
In 2003, the IT departments were brought together as one team in one location. They adopted ITIL to consolidate workflows and ensure everyone spoke a common language, which proved successful.
This positive experience encouraged Equinor to introduce ITIL into Equinor GBS, providing a single framework for managing all services, not just IT. The goal was to take a customer-centric view of its shared services, rather than one based on internal function.
A cogent, efficient operation requires buy-in from higher management:
With overmanning reduced by 1200 people in the last four years, and with a 35 per cent cost reduction, these efficiencies have paid off for Equinor GBS. The process of adopting ITIL is ongoing, and the company is becoming ever more ambitious with its roll-out:
Equinor is thinking through everything it does. Its adoption of ITIL and the ServiceNow platform is enabling consolidation and greater efficiency across the wider business. Equinor GBS is showing that it can adapt successful practices of the past to prepare for a promising future.
Erik Dahl has been with Statoil/Equinor for more than 25 years. He is currently Vice President of Equinor Global Business Services (GBS), where he is responsible for service management and shared services.
Erik’s team continually work to improve GBS’s back office functions, transforming them from business functions to re-usable services through the adoption of ITIL principles.
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All images are copyright Equinor.
Credit cover image: Bo B Randulff; credit Equinor offices image: Ole Jørgen Bratland; credit Johan Sverdrup field image: Kjetil Eide; credit Erik Dahl portrait: Ellen Maria Skjelsbæk.
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