Why City of London Replaced ServiceNow With Power Platform
When the City of London reviewed its IT service management options, four priorities shaped the final decision: flexibility, expandability, security, and cost.
The previous shared ITSM solution had limited internal control, which leadership described as having “hamstrung” the organisation.
The city needed a platform it could own, manage, and modify without depending on outside specialists.
ServiceNow no longer met those needs.
ServiceTeam ITSM, built on Microsoft Power Platform, offered a direct alternative.
It kept data within the city’s own Azure tenant, supported low-code configuration, and aligned with an existing organisational move toward Microsoft 365 and Power Platform across operations.
The city is also responsible for maintaining numerous public gardens across London, and Power Platform has extended into that area too, with over 100 employees using a custom Power App to replace a previous paper-based garden maintenance system.
ServiceNow continues to attract organisations exploring AI-driven transformation, with events such as the AI Summit London bringing together customers to explore automation and intelligent service operations.
The move also supports integration strategies that provide real-time data synchronization across applications to streamline workflows and reduce duplication.
How ServiceTeam ITSM Reduced Service Desk Overload
Before the City of London could scale its IT operations, it needed to reduce the volume of work landing directly on service desk agents.
Scaling IT operations starts with solving the right problem: too much routine work reaching the wrong hands.
ServiceTeam ITSM addressed this through three core mechanisms:
- Self-service tools — A portal surfaced known issues, cutting unnecessary ticket submissions.
- Automated routing — Requests moved to the right team without manual intervention.
- Touchless requests — Power Automate converted routine submissions into fully automated workflows.
Provance reports automation reduces routine task time by over 50%. Agents handled fewer repetitive requests, freeing capacity for higher-priority work that genuinely required human attention. ServiceTeam ITSM also uses AI-powered ticket classification that continuously learns and adapts over time, suggesting appropriate field values by analyzing ticket details to minimize manual intervention.
Service desk managers benefit from Power BI dashboards that provide detailed operational data with drill-down capability, enabling informed decisions about resource allocation and workload distribution. A documented process mapping approach ensured roles, escalation paths, and integration points were clearly defined to support sustainable improvements.
Why Azure Hosting and Role-Based Access Protect Sensitive Data
Reducing ticket volume and automating workflows addressed the City of London’s service desk burden, but operational efficiency means little if the underlying infrastructure cannot protect the data moving through it. Azure hosting and role-based access controls address this directly.
- Physical security: Microsoft datacenters use layered controls with need-to-access entry approval. Regional availability supports distributing workloads across multiple locations to enhance resilience and compliance.
- Data protection: Azure applies Zero Trust networking, FIPS 140-3 compliant HSMs, and NIST 800-88-compliant drive wiping.
- Access governance: Privileged Identity Management enforces just-in-time administrative access, eliminating persistent privileges.
These controls support compliance with ISO 27001, FedRAMP, and UK G-Cloud requirements for public-sector workloads. Azure operates across more than 70 regions worldwide, organizing infrastructure within defined data residency boundaries to support high availability and disaster recovery for sensitive public-sector data. For workloads requiring additional protection, Azure Key Vault safeguards cryptographic keys and other secrets used by cloud apps and services.
What the Power Platform Migration Delivered for City of London
After replacing paper-based garden management with a Microsoft Power App, the City of London saw measurable gains across reporting speed, audit completion, and operational visibility. The results were clear and consistent:
- Reporting time dropped from 7 days to 24 hours—an 80% reduction
- Audit completion rose from 70% to 95%
- Over 100 employees used the app daily
Managers could track issue status, expected resolution times, and work progress in real time. Digital dashboards replaced manual handoffs. The low-code Power Platform design made the solution easy to configure, scale, and adapt without heavy technical resources. When organizations need to consolidate environments across organizational boundaries, tenant-to-tenant migration supports moving production and sandbox environments from one tenant to another.
City of London and City of London Police first adopted ITSM in 2013 through a Managed Services Provider, but limitations in that shared environment ultimately drove the need for an in-house owned solution built on flexible, secure, and cost-effective foundations. Many organisations now pair such tools with Integration Platform as a Service to streamline connections between cloud and on-premises systems.
