How NASCAR Is Racing to ITOps Digital Transformation with ServiceNow

Racing cars around an oval for hundreds of laps at NASCAR events involves a whole lot of technology and engineering know-how.

But beyond keeping the cars on the track, there is also a tremendous amount of technology behind the scenes at NASCAR. Races are massive events involving myriad moving pieces (literally) and thousands of people. In a bid to keep the whole operation moving as efficiently as possible, NASCAR has been leaning on ServiceNow to aid with digital transformation across IT operations and enable employees across multiple departments in the organization to be as productive as possible. 

NASCAR recently began rolling out ServiceNow employee workflows and low-code technologies to further its IT automation efforts. By harnessing the power of ServiceNow's platform, NASCAR is transforming outdated manual procedures for employee service requests across various departments such as HR and IT into efficient digital workflows. This will not only enhance NASCAR's employee experience but also optimize processes, enabling employees to dedicate more time to catering to fans.

"If you think about it, NASCAR is actually a very engineering and technologically based sport to begin with. It's all about the engineering that goes into those cars," Chris Tozier, managing director, enterprise applications at NASCAR, told ITPro Today. "People focus on the race itself, but it's also very much what happens in the pit and in the garages and in the research and development."

Related:ServiceNow Brings Workplace Scenario Planning to ITOps

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There is more to NASCAR than just cars and racetracks and the cars; it is a corporation with a lot of different facets, employees, and business practices, just like any other type of enterprise, Tozier said. NASCAR has a lot of mobile and remote employees as the organization is literally always on the move to wherever the next race is being held. Supporting all of those efforts with manual IT processes is not a winning proposition, which is why the racing organization has embraced ServiceNow.

"We really wanted to bring this workforce together," Tozier said. "We can't really wait for an old school, traditional centralized IT organization to respond to a very dynamic environment, so ServiceNow was key to enabling our new way of working."

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ITSM at NASCAR Is Only Part of the Digital Transformation

NASCAR first engaged with ServiceNow for IT service management (ITSM).

"Our first iteration of our ServiceNow experience was solely around ITSM, and it brought immediate change to us because it allowed our employees to interact with IT in a different way," Tozier said.

Related:Benefits of Digital Transformation: 5 Tools for Software Development

Following on the success of the ITSM deployment, Tozier's team realized that ServiceNow could offer NASCAR a lot more than just support for internal IT operations with ITSM, he said. NASCAR is now implementing the ServiceNow Employee Center, which brings tools and services to employees and not just IT operations. The Employee Center serves as NASCAR's corporate portal that is operationally focused for employees.

Tozier said that with changes at NASCAR and the dynamic nature of its operations, a key problem was many employees didn't know who to call or where to go for help.

"When everybody's in a building, you can lean over a cubicle and ask somebody, but that changes in a hybrid world, so we had that renewed focus on employee operations," he said. "We also weren't mobile-enabled in that space at all before, so just having the ability of people to do all things from their phone in an organization like ours has been very helpful for us."

Enabling employees to create applications more easily with ServiceNow's low-code services is another step forward. Tozier emphasized that the goal is to empower employees to have the tools they need to get their jobs done.

Looking forward, NASCAR envisions ServiceNow helping its digital transformation extend to its partners and potentially even fans.

"Hopefully in a couple of years, we'll impact partners and fans in a more public way, where we're providing unified experiences for them coming to our events — that's our stretch goal," Tozier said.