HPE and Stagwell: why bring their services together on ServiceNow?
C-Level · Week of 25–31 October 2026
HPE and Stagwell announced their choice of ServiceNow to connect services involving several teams. HPE plans to bring together stages of customer support. Stagwell is unifying employee support across its agencies.
ServiceNow is a platform for organising and automating work in businesses. A request can involve information, approvals and tasks handled by different people. The platform provides applications to follow that journey through to resolution.
Grab a coffee or your favourite drink. ☕ Let's follow two journeys: a customer who needs help and an employee looking for an internal service. They help explain what lies behind these business decisions.
HPE: connecting a request for help to field service
Where did this news come from? From ServiceNow's announcement about HPE, dated 28 October 2026. This corporate publication has no individual byline and includes a statement from Mark Bakker, an HPE executive.
The announced agreement runs for five years and covers support for HPE's Cloud & AI business, which focuses on cloud computing and artificial intelligence. The company wants to connect teams and simplify processes to provide easier, faster and more personalised support.
What is in the plan?
The planned implementation brings together support requests, customer service, technician visits, equipment information and data from support systems. The announcement also includes connections between organisations and control over the use of artificial intelligence.
Two components help explain this combination: Customer Service Management, for organising customer support, and Field Service Management, for organising the work technicians carry out on site.
What does this choice require of management?
In NORA's reading, the decision brings customer service, field teams and equipment information into the same management discussion. The expected benefit depends on work moving between these parts.
One concern is improving each stage while still taking too long to resolve the overall request. A case may be routed quickly yet remain on hold waiting for a spare part. This is an illustrative risk for assessing the process, not a diagnosis of HPE's operations.
How might this affect a customer?
Illustrative example, not an account of HPE's implementation: a company asks for help because a piece of equipment has failed. The support team gathers information and identifies the need for a visit. The technician needs to know what has already been investigated and which part to bring. For the person asking for help, repeating everything whenever a different team takes over is tiring. 😕
For the customer, what matters is continuity when the request moves to another team. For the technician, it is receiving enough information to do the job. This handover between people explains the value of connecting the process.
The announcement anticipates more efficient service and more repairs completed on the first visit. It provides no metrics showing results already achieved by this implementation. Nor does it establish that all HPE support faced the same problems or that the project is complete.
See the product in an official demonstration
The Field Service Management presentation on ServiceNow's official page helps make field work easier to picture. As you watch, look at the connection between the service request, scheduling and the person who will attend.
In English · around 3 minutes. A general product presentation, not HPE's implementation. Open the video in another tab.
🧭 NORA guidance | Follow the whole service journey When assessing a change like this, compare the total time to resolution before and after implementation, including waiting time between teams. Also track repairs completed on the first visit and whether customers have to repeat information. These are indicators suggested by NORA; no targets or results have been disclosed for this project. The customer needs continuity between teams.
Stagwell: shared services for a network of agencies
Where did this news come from? From ServiceNow's announcement about Stagwell, also dated 28 October 2026. It has no individual byline and includes statements from Stephanie Howley, Stagwell's people leader, and Merrill Raman, its technology leader.
The marketing network comprises more than 70 agencies. According to the publication, acquisitions brought different systems, fragmented approval paths and custom connections between tools.
The announced decision is to consolidate four IT service desks and bring together human resources (HR), information technology (IT) and security services. The announced scope covers more than 10,000 employees, with the aim of preserving agency autonomy.
One place to ask for help
The plan combines HR Service Delivery, for organising HR services, and ServiceNow EmployeeWorks as a common entry point for HR and IT support. It includes onboarding and offboarding activities involving payroll, equipment and access.
Illustrative example: a newly acquired agency needs to request a correction to an employee record and help with an access problem. “Who do I speak to now?” 🤔 For the employee, learning about the four former service desks and working out which handles each issue would be extra work. A common entry point can make requesting help easier; the responsible teams still need to receive the information and complete their tasks.
Growing without rebuilding support after every acquisition
Stagwell links the consolidation to integrating future acquisitions. The announcement describes an implementation in progress but does not say how much time or effort it has already saved.
The difference from HPE lies in who receives the service: here, it is employees across a network of agencies. The stated challenge is to share the support structure while each agency retains its way of working.
What should be standardised while preserving autonomy?
The management choice is to define which services should operate in a common way across the network and which differences need to remain within each agency. This is the question NORA highlights in the announcement.
As an example of such a decision, a group could adopt a common way to request equipment and track requests while retaining different approval arrangements to meet each unit's needs. The rule needs to be understandable both to people requesting help and to those providing it. This is an illustrative situation, not a confirmed Stagwell configuration.
See how a request can move across systems
In the official ServiceNow EmployeeWorks demonstration, the supplier presents an experience for routing work between systems and teams. It helps make the idea of a common entry point for employees more concrete.
In English · around 3 minutes. A general supplier demonstration, not Stagwell's implementation. Open the video in another tab.
🧭 NORA guidance | Check the journey beyond the portal When bringing internal services together, track how many requests need to be redirected and how long they take to resolve. For new acquisitions, compare the time needed to make common services available and listen to employees about difficulties using them. These measures are NORA's suggestions, not benefits already demonstrated by Stagwell. A common entry point needs to lead to service that works.
What to take into the next decision
NORA's reading of these two cases is that the choice of platform is linked to coordinating the whole service: customer support and field work at HPE; employee support and agency integration at Stagwell.
These objectives call for different criteria. For customer support, what matters is the time to resolve the problem and the quality of the technician's visit. For a network acquiring agencies, it is how much work must be repeated with each integration and whether employees can use the shared services.
🧭 NORA guidance | Compare what has actually changed Compare the same type of service before and after the change, including the quality of delivery. Faster resolution does not help if the customer has to reopen the request. When integrating an agency, also check whether people have received the access and support they need. The benefit needs to show up in completed work.
The next evidence to watch is what has gone live, what has changed in these indicators and what customers, technicians and employees report. The announcements do not establish that ServiceNow is the best choice for every company; they show two decisions with specific scopes and expected benefits.
Let's return to the people at the start: the customer wants their problem resolved; the employee needs to be able to work. Helping a request move between teams is what makes the change useful to them. And that experience deserves a place in the next management discussion. 💛
Sources and editorial transparency
ServiceNow — HPE announcement, 28 October 2026.
ServiceNow — Stagwell announcement, 28 October 2026.
Official documentation: Customer Service Management, Field Service Management and HR Service Delivery. Consulted in the official ServiceNowDocs repository, Brazil family, generally available since 6 November 2026. The files indicate an update on 10 September 2026. This is a current explanatory reference; it does not establish which version is covered by the companies’ contracts.
Official videos: Field Service Management page and ServiceNow EmployeeWorks page, with their respective players embedded above. The field service video was published on 18 November 2025; the EmployeeWorks video on 9 October 2026, according to public metadata. They provide explanatory support; they are neither news from the reporting window nor evidence of the implementations discussed. The start of playback was verified for both players during this review. The full EmployeeWorks captions were checked; neither video received a full audiovisual inspection. Interfaces, features and terms of use may vary.
Reporting window: 25–31 October 2026. Sources checked again on 11 November 2026. The announcements come from the supplier and include customer statements; they do not constitute an independent assessment of results. Two cases do not represent the whole market. No environments, integrations or licences were tested.
The examples and images are illustrative. NORA guidance consists of editorial recommendations. Content consolidation and writing support: NORA — Sinais do Mercado. Editorial review and final approval: André Costa Moreira.
