AON optimises ITSM and UX

Aon PLC is a British-American multinational professional services firm. The organisation provides a range of financial risk-mitigation products, including insurance, pension administration, and health-insurance plans, to help clients make better decisions. Its IT Services department comprises around 70 staff members.

When professional services firm Aon approached Pink Elephant in 2021, its IT services department, despite being efficient and aligned with ITIL V3 best practices, recognised that its process-driven mindset was affecting its user experience. Aon was seeking to establish ITIL4-aligned practices that would be enabled by its toolset rather than driving them, with a core objective to transform its ITSM user experience. Departments were siloed, and there was a lack of guidelines and control/governance mechanisms, which was described as "confusing and overwhelming at times".

Aon’s IT Service Management aimed to undergo major changes in its operating model, procedures, and structure to reduce complexities, adopt ITIL4 best practices, and improve agility as part of ITSM optimisation and maturity programmes. The company's main challenges included ensuring the adoption and consistency of operations across its global IT organisation, a complexity partly due to growth through acquisitions and mergers. A significant issue was also the consistency of incident prioritisation and awareness of business impact across its 2500+ business services.

Aon PLC is a multinational professional services firm that provides financial risk-mitigation services to clients worldwide, including insurance, pension administration and health-insurance plans. Aon’s IT Services department supports around 70 staff and 2,500-plus business services in production.

The team was operating efficiently and was already aligned to ITIL V3 best practice, but its way of working was driven by the toolset rather than by the people using the service. As Aon grew through acquisitions and mergers, departments became siloed and there was a lack of guidelines and governance, which leaders described as confusing and overwhelming at times.

Aon wanted to evaluate its ITSM alignment against industry best practice, adopt ITIL 4-aligned practices that the toolset would enable rather than dictate, and shift from a process-led model to a service-led, user-focused operating model.

We worked remotely with Aon over four months to assess and reshape its IT Service Management. Pink Elephant principal consultant Alan Munday interviewed more than 35 staff across IT and business disciplines in Europe, Asia Pacific and the Americas, building a thorough picture of how ITSM was performing in practice.

The work was anchored by PinkScan, our independent and objective assessment of ITSM maturity. PinkScan has evolved alongside ITIL and is trusted because the results and recommendations are completely impartial to the technology or people in place. Alongside the assessment, we reviewed documentation, mapped maturity by practice and worked with each process owner to translate findings into specific activities and priorities.

We also developed a draft IT reporting scorecard and a Major Incident Management Prioritisation Matrix to drive consistency of understanding and operation across Aon’s global organisation.

Pink Elephant is a very well-known and established consulting firm and has an undisputed reputation for leading the way towards IT Service Management best practices. Hence Pink Elephant was the first choice to get an assessment of ITSM maturity at Aon.

Bharti Sharma, IT Senior Director, Aon

The assessment confirmed that Aon’s ITSM maturity was significantly higher than industry standards across the majority of practices, and gave the leadership team an evidence base for the next phase of optimisation.

• Independent ITSM maturity benchmark across all key practices, with prioritised improvement areas.
• Shift from a process-driven to a service-driven mindset, with senior leadership fully aligned.
• Unified service catalogue framework that defines, measures and improves service performance.
• Move from siloed teams to an integrated service approach, supported by Major Incident Management prioritisation tools.

One of the biggest impacts is the readiness and acceptance to shift towards a service focus, including a unified service catalogue, establishing a framework to define services, measure and assess service performance, and shift from siloed to a more integrated services approach.

Bharti Sharma, IT Senior Director, Aon