JFKIAT implements ESP's AirportNow IT service management solution

JFKIAT identified the need for a consolidated IT Service Management platform capable of providing end to end visibility of our common use, terminal, safety & security and back-office systems & technologies. We wanted a streamlined interface to raise incidents, service requests, and to manage problems. Once we engaged with ESP on the AirportNow solution, we quickly realized there was significant effort required on our part to define these processes, document them, and share with ESP’s development team to get to work. A similar challenge was encountered when we started to explore utilizing AirportNow for IT Asset Management. To configure our Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to provide the capability we were looking for, required extensive efforts reviewing each IT service and the linked assets that make up that service. Quickly realizing that these configurations and relationships would be foundations aspects for all numerous future initiatives, such as IT Change Management and managing stakeholder notifications from AirportNow. We quickly realized that collaboration and partnership with ESP was going to be critical to the success of the AirportNow solution.

The single biggest win for the JFKIAT ‘IT & Digital’ management team has just been a single pane of glass for the entire team to be able to view, manage, and report on their respective IT Service domains. It provides us the ability to standardize our approach to Incident/Service Management based on ITIL principles. Having everything in a centralized repository provides us the ability to access usable data and build dashboards to visualize things such as daily ticket volumes, ticket volume by IT Service, ticket volume by time of day, etc. These data insights have helped us develop new preventative maintenance schedules based on trend analysis, augment staffing to meeting peak passenger volumes during the day and to be able to monitor ESP plus 3rd party adherence to contractual SLAs.

A recent major improvement for JFKT4 was the release of ESP Scan2Fix capabilities. This new functionality provided mobile capabilities for incident reporting and streamlined the process exponentially. With one touch, a QR code can be scanned, and an incident opened and details such as asset, location, etc. are automatically populated, significantly simplifying the incident management process for our end users. As with most things, there are always opportunities to optimize. IT&D management in partnership with ESP, are now regularly able to review incidents, customer feedback, and collaborate on ways to improve moving forward.

Like many new partnerships there were some growing pains initially as the teams learned how to work together. However, ESP proved to be capable, dedicated, and flexible.

At JFKIAT, we always seek to identify strategic partners and not just a service provider. As the program has matured, we have developed a collaborative operating model that has worked well for both organizations and has really shifted ESP from service provider to a trusted technology partner. We welcome feedback and recommendations from their team and look to collaborate on improvements and enhancements.

During our initial go live with ESP, we were part of a shared AirportNow tenancy. While the shared tenancy worked for us initially, we quickly realized that our roadmap for improvement was being hindered by the lack of available customizations in the shared tenancy. ESP proposed a revised AirportNow solution that provides JFKIAT with its own tenancy, that is hosted, managed, and supported by ESP. Together, we were able to build the business case, plan accordingly to migrate our data to a new dedicated instance. This has given us the ability to not only customize workflows and configurations but future proof ourselves from a service delivery standpoint and enable us to tackle future challenges like integration with our data lake or integrations with our other managed services partner (MSP) ITSM systems.

We have recently contracted ESP to provide a dedicated developer to allow more flexibility, expedite improvements, and help us maintain and develop standards and consistency within the AirportNow platform. We could not be happier with the end results and the partnership with ESP thus far and look forward to continuing to build on this momentum.