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TomTom is the world’s leading independent geolocation technology specialist. Since 1991, the company’s maps, digital cockpit solutions, navigation software, and traffic data have helped people and organizations make their way around the world. TomTom has over 30 offices in cities worldwide and a growing workforce generating over $500 million in revenue.
employees
4 continents
2021 revenue
in business
As technology changes, so does how we navigate neighborhoods, cities, countries, and the globe. As a result, location data doesn’t just need to be accurate; it needs to shift in real-time to reflect traffic, points of interest, and more.
Deploying software changes faster depends upon automation. Manual processes in the continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipeline can slow the deployment process considerably. Therefore, companies who want to develop software in a cutting-edge manner must embrace automation across the software development and delivery processes.
For the 160 development teams responsible for CI/CD pipelines at TomTom, manually approving emergency changes, QAs, and managing tickets become a bottleneck in the release process.
The team used a set of tools and approaches, including:
These were meant to help teams manage tickets, improve team communication, and automate tasks, but ultimately, leadership found that some tools sat dormant while others didn’t offer them the full functionality developers were looking for.
In addition to their need for faster deployment, TomTom’s engineering leadership lacked the infrastructure necessary to track DORA metrics. Without this, the team had no baseline data for things like lead time, deployment frequency, mean time to restore (MTTR), and change fail percentage.
While the team struggled to track these metrics internally, they also juggled similar requests from clients. TomTom’s customers needed access to baseline data, availability reports, and performance management tools to help them use the company’s products efficiently. The absence of self-management tools negatively impacted customer satisfaction.
RapDev is an engineering consulting firm that helps organizations gain visibility into their cloud-native services and infrastructure by implementing ServiceNow. The company’s expertise in DevOps and modern development practices means it can create customized implementations for each customer. For TomTom, RapDev’s engineers recommended utilizing the ServiceNow DevOps application to track DORA metrics.
In addition to implementing ServiceNow’s DevOps module, RapDev also set up ServiceNow integrations with Jira, Slack, and PagerDuty. As a ServiceNow Elite Partner, RapDev is an expert at implementing existing integrations on the platform and building ServiceNow-native integrations as clients need them.
The Slack, Jira, and PagerDuty integrations enabled the development teams to execute one-touch approvals, automate the change management process, and better manage the overall ticketing process.
Partnering with RapDev enabled TomTom to:
After deploying the ServiceNow DevOps module and change management integrations, TomTom’s development team has the visibility they need to make more informed decisions across the organization and integrations to automate multiple processes across the CI/CD pipeline.
“We built out a configuration with some automation,” said Scott Mitchell, head of IT service management at TomTom. “The tools are quite powerful, but we didn’t want to get too tricky too fast. We’re seeing now that we can measure service levels, the basic ones for internal problem management, our SLAs, and a lot of the things we used to do manually.”
Not only is TomTom pleased with the increased deployment speed and frequency, but they’re also seeing greater customer satisfaction with the launch of their customer self-service portals. Now, customers can access a comprehensive IT service management platform with the metrics they need to adapt and innovate in their organizations.
“For anything that we can’t handle or is a huge piece of work,” Mitchell said, “RapDev will be our provider of choice. Traditional problems you have with vendors around controlling scope, scope creep, and checking additional charges — stuff like that — it’s never been like that with RapDev. It’s always been a good relationship. That’s part of why we extended our contract for several phases of more support.”
With ServiceNow’s value proven, TomTom is now looking to implement the platform across its entire organization, helping them bring automation, visibility, and data-driven decision-making in development processes to the whole company. TomTom is always looking for new ways to help users navigate the world, and RapDev is helping them stay one step ahead of the competition.
