With up to 50.000 employees and contractors, it was important for Equinor to create an enterprise solution that could scale, create a unified experience and be easy to navigate for all their employees. Learn how one of the world’s largest energy companies has leveraged the value from ServiceNow’s Employee Center.

Challenging to find services and information

Equinor has used ServiceNow's Service Portal for their employees for many years. The Service Portal offers more than 1.500 services and 5000 knowledge articles. In 2018 Equinor rebranded the Service Portal, which gave the portal a more corporate visual identity, although the structure and usability was not improved. However, it was challenging for the users to find  the services and information they needed in the Service Portal. Several internal functions (i.e: IT, Subsurface services) wanted their own Service Portals to display their services, thinking that would solve the issue for the users and make it easier to find the different services in the Service Portal.

Equinor decided to create a vison and a strategy to set the direction for how the Service Portal should look like going forward.

Vision:
A Service Portal with a personalized touch and feel.
Providing services and support needed based on previous personal use and a “persona” usage approach.

Strategy:
One common portal for Equinor, accessible from personal preferred devices. Modern, easy-to-navigate and user friendly. Strengthen service ownership and improve the ability for self-service and automation.

A new structured universe

To meet the vision and strategy, Equinor decided to transition to ServiceNow's Employee Center.  The Employee Center ensures Equinor uses the newest technology and can leverage the new features from ServiceNow, which makes it more flexible going forward.

The journey - from idea to launch

To ensure a successful transition from the Service Portal to the Employee Center, Equinor established a project team with experts (Architects and UI/UX designers) from The Cloud People and employees from the Corporate Service Management team (Service Portal Editor and Service Analysts) in Equinor. Also, a reference group with internal stakeholders like union representatives, service owners and service portfolio owners was setup.

The first step was to investigate the different users,  how they use the portal and to identify their needs from the new Employee Center. To solve this, the team developed different personas, by interviewing and gathering information from key stakeholders and employee groups in Equinor. This was important as people working in different areas such as HR, IT, Finance, Administration, Facility, offshore etc. had different needs and ways of working.

It was also essential to decide upon a governance at an early stage, as there were so many parameters to consider. What should the taxonomy look like, and what should be allowed on the frontpage? Questions like these were of major importance and played a pivotal role in ensuring a successful transition to the new Employee Center.

Throughout the entire project there was a close cooperation between Equinor and The Cloud People. The project started in May 2022, where the team spent time gathering and structuring data and information from workshops. After summer the prototype was made and decided upon. The technical implementation took three months and Equinor could launch their new Employee Center in December 2022.

The benefits for Equinor

With the new Employee Center, Equinor has gained various benefits such as:

• A new rebranded portal, with the corporate identity across all functions.
• The newest technology which makes them able to utilize the new features from ServiceNow going forward.
• Easy to scale and add new business functions to the Employee Center.
• The new AI search, which makes it easier to find content.
• The possibility to personalize the content/portal to different employee groups, making it easier for them to find what is relevant and important to them.
• A mobile app that creates a unified experience across platforms and gives the employees easy access to the Employee Center on-the-go.

In the future, Equinor aims to personalize the content even more and work with analytics to gain an overview of how to improve the search and content of the Employee Center.