Unlocking Value through Cloud & AI: One NZ's Modernization Journey with Ashish Shivhare

Chad Watt: Welcome to Ahead in the Cloud, where business leaders share what they've learned on their Cloud journey. I'm Chad Watt, Infosys Knowledge Institute researcher and writer. Today I'm joined by Ashish Shivhare, Tribe Leader, and Engineering Manager for IT platforms at One NZ. One NZ is a leading telecom provider in New Zealand offering mobile and fixed-line communication solutions for individuals and businesses. One NZ is locally owned and currently focused on meeting the ever-increasing communication needs of its customers. Welcome to Ahead in the Cloud, Ashish.

Ashish Shivhare: Thank you. Thank you, Chad. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.

Chad Watt: Well, Ashish, first off, tell us a little bit about yourself and then your organization.

Ashish Shivhare: At One New Zealand, I think we are committed to leveraging our latest technologies to not only connect people but help New Zealand business and people around it. And our rebranding to One New Zealand reflects our focus on putting New Zealand at the heart of everything we do, not just by providing reliable services, but also supporting local communities through various initiatives.

I've been working in the technology space for over 18 years now and focusing on IT transformation, DevOps, played for modernization, IT operations, and then my journey really started as a proxy developer. That gave me a pretty strong foundation technically, but then from there on, I've expanded my expertise by taking on different roles across various product, customers, and regions. Currently, I'm responsible for overseeing key plate format One New Zealand such as ServiceNow, SAP, ERP, DevOps tooling, integration, and DevOps. And obviously working along with highly talented team of MyNews, really continuously innovate and deliver value to the business.

Chad Watt: Ashish, can you explain what was the challenge with IT Service Management at One NZ?

Ashish Shivhare: Yeah, I'm glad you asked this question because every large organization faces similar challenges. The key challenges we encountered with our IT service management system were multi-faced. First, the user and the customer experience were suboptimal, so there were usability issues that caused frustration within the team, which impacted the overall satisfaction.

Another challenge was the time to the market. Our old legacy platform didn't have the flexibility and the scalability we needed to roll out new features and services quickly. Additionally, as you know, regulation and operational requirements became more complex nowadays. Ensuring security compliance is a growing concern for everyone. So, our legacy system was not as adaptable to these changes as we needed to be, so it was posing a potential risk to us.

From financial standpoint also maintaining a legacy system became increasingly resource intensive, and it doesn't really support and meet our modernization capabilities. And lastly, I think the strategic point as well, the system was not aligned with our broader goal of digital transformation, so we needed a solution that could really drive innovation, streamline process, and ultimately deliver a better outcome for our customers.

Chad Watt: Ashish, so what did you do to solve the problem?

Ashish Shivhare: Reminded me of good old days. We had to a lot of workshop and brainstorming session, and in terms of the solution, we embarked on this modernization journey in late 2022, start up 2023, and we took a very structured approach, guided by three horizon model.

While the overall vision spans around multiple phases, our initial focus was on horizon one. Here we concentrated on building core platforms by migrating these service management application and services to the Cloud. Now to be honest, this was just a foundation for the future innovation while addressing some immediate operation need. Because over a period of time, we ended up with multiple versions of ITSM platform, which led to some inconsistencies and inefficiency.

So, in horizon one, the goal was to unify and streamline our incident problem and change management process into one strategy Cloud-based, scalable platform. And to achieve this, we selected ServiceNow as our platform of choice and marking and beginning of our modernization journeys supported by our strategic partner, Infosys. And alongside the core ITSM function, as I say, I think we took this an opportunity to also adopt case management, CSM, ITOM, which is operations management and even TSM, Telecom Services Management. So yeah, we took that approach, and it really worked for us.

Chad Watt: Great. So, what were the challenges you faced in that journey, and how did Infosys help you?

Ashish Shivhare: Yeah, there was so many challenges. Honestly, if you ask me, it was the last transformation project. But one of the biggest challenges we faced was managing the complexity of running a multi-phase project while still keeping our day-to-day operations running smoothly. So, we needed to make sure that our transition to the new platform was seamless, minimizing disruptions, while also meeting the ongoing business demand for support and services.

So, to tackle this, we formed a resolute DevOps team. The formation of DevOps model honestly was real instrumental in overcoming these challenges. It brings the culture of collaboration, automation, delivery, continuous delivery. So, this whole DevOps approach allowed us to streamline both transition and BAU activities, and this model also ensured that while we are managing operational demand, we are not slowing down the pace of the project.

And again, I would like to call it that our partnership with Infosys was critical for overcoming these challenges because their deep expertise in this multi-phase projects, DevOps practices, really helped us implement the right automation tool and processes that were required. We also took help from Infosys of providing the ongoing support of BAU activities and making sure that these service level standards are being maintained, so it was a great journey with our partner teams.

Chad Watt: Have you worked with DevOps before this project?

Ashish Shivhare: Yes. I had experience working in the DevOps before, but I think I used all of, and I've studied a lot, and I've used all of my learnings and experience when I was trying to build this whole DevOps model, and that really played a role because we wanted a proper DevOps model where we take the full accountability from concept to implementation and post support. And I think it really worked for us. So yeah, it did help me.

Chad Watt: You were making a migration from Legacy Systems to Cloud. Tell me, when did you finish the Cloud migration that was relevant to this? And once that was complete, what came next?

Ashish Shivhare: See, this whole horizon one, which is moving to the Cloud itself, was a huge effort from our site. And I think we took a lot of time doing this properly in a more structured way. But after the Cloud migration is finished, our shift, our focus towards really leveraging this per capability and towards enhancing our customer experience.

So, we wanted to create a real seamless and responsive service management environment. And to do this, I think we introduced a lot of service new capabilities. And let me think. We have ServiceNow app, we self-service app. We launch an app so that we can empower users to find their solutions on their own, reducing the support ticket, and allowing them to focus on more complex issues. We did workflow automation. This really helped us to fulfill service requests faster. In fact, 80% of our service requests are now automated today, meeting customer expectation for quicker responses.

We improved our observability. We integrated our ITSM system with our monitoring tool, so we could automatically create ticket for any issues and helping us spot the problem earlier. In a typical telecom world, I think we also integrated our case management with our CRM system, added a new module for our consumer complaints. So that's really enhanced our ability to manage the interaction.

Last but not the least, I think what was really important is to make sure that we maintain our software currencies. We stay up to date with our latest patches and versions, so we ensure that team is focused on maintaining the platform. We have completed four major projects, and we are always maintaining that, so that really help us to leverage the latest features and the functionality of the product. One thing I can say, and I think I'm pretty proud of it, that one of the biggest wins for this initiative is our ITSM system today is always, in terms of the platform availability, is always near a hundred percent, which is a significant improve from the reliability of our service history.

Chad Watt: Ashish, what was the biggest factor in achieving that level of success?

Ashish Shivhare: There were quite a few. And I think as I mentioned, in addition to forming a resolute DevOps team to ensure there's continuity and quality through the project, adopting an agile delivery model with a proper tribe and squad framework was key to our success. How it allowed us to stay agile, quickly adapt business needs, foster collaboration across team, and this agile structure with its various standard ceremonies like sprint reviews and retrospective played a huge role in helping us create a continuous feedback loop with the business for our further improvements. So, we also really established a clear front door process with our business to effectively manage our backlog, the BAU backlog, while the project was in a full swing. So again, this of course with our partnership with Infosys played a big role. Their agile methodologies, expertise, and the practices really helped us to stay on track in this life cycle.

Chad Watt: Talk about agile, people talk about DevOps. What is the difference between being able to say we have tribes and squads and implementing a proper tribe and squad framework?

Ashish Shivhare: So, I think agile structure is more of the ways of delivery and how you get better aligned and ensure that there is a faster delivery to the outcome. So, when I say proper tribe and squad structure means there's various ways of doing agile, and there are standard methodologies of how to implement agile. And we took a very thorough approach and properly implemented it in the sense that we have got right standard ceremonies in a place where tribe and inter-tribe connects to each other, squad connects to each other. We have got a clear, well-defined front door process where we evaluate the business demands in a more structured way, and then we have got a very clear structure sprint process to help us deliver the outcome. And we have a retrospective to take the feedback. So, we follow the full agile life cycle and introduce properly in our delivery model, and that's what I call it as proper agile.

Chad Watt: Ashish, what's next for One New Zealand and your team?

Ashish Shivhare: Right. I think looking ahead, the future of One New Zealand is really exciting and promising, I would say, especially as we move on to our horizon three initiatives. So, in this whole next phase, we are focused on implementing the next gen capabilities, and that will boost both our operational efficiencies and customer experience.

See, as an organization, we have a vision to become an AI-driven telecom, and I think we are already working on several initiatives to make that vision a reality. For an example, in ITSM space, we plan to integrate our AI-driven analytics and machine learnings to introduce into the ITSM processes. Now, this will allow us to use predictive analysis to proactively manage our services. We are also working on a seamless integration with our enterprise customer through our product, so this will eliminate manual time-consuming tasks we often refer to as civil chair and making it more efficient. On top of that, we are looking to integrate our ITSM with our data lake solution. Now, this will give us an ability to leverage real-time data for both predict and resolve issues before they even arise and give us more of a personalized, seamless experience for our customers.

Chad Watt: I'm going to give you one free ride in a time machine. You're going to go back to the day you started this project, day one on this project. What's the advice you would give your younger self?

Ashish Shivhare: So, if I have to go back and offer one piece of advice to my younger self before starting this initiative, it would be just expecting the unexpected and roll with it. So, I mean, I will tell you myself, embrace flexibility and adaptability even more. Large-scale projects rarely go as exactly as planned. So being open to challenges, whether in timeline, scope, and approach becomes crucial. So, it's all about trusting the process, but being ready to pivot, when necessary, matters, and sometimes when we pivot, lead these innovative solutions, and smoother journey to the end goal. So that's one advice of which I can think.

Chad Watt: Great. Thank you for your time today, Ashish.

Ashish Shivhare: Thank you very much, Chad. Nice talking to you.

Chad Watt: This podcast is part of our collaboration with MIT TechReview in partnership with Infosys Cobalt. Visit our content hub on technologyreview.com to learn more about how businesses across the globe are moving from cloud chaos to cloud clarity. Be sure to follow Ahead in the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts. You can find more details in our show notes and transcripts at infosys.com/iki in our podcast section. Thanks to our producers, Christine Calhoun, and Yulia Debari. Dode Bigley is our audio technician, and I'm Chad Watt with the Infosys Knowledge Institute signing off. Until next time, keep learning and keep sharing.