Deloitte Australia leads multi-year ServiceNow project for Rio Tinto 

Deloitte Australia has led a multi-year ServiceNow HR integration project for global mining giant Rio Tinto, organising teams from across multiple countries. 

Back in 2021, the global mining giant required a HR system that could handle its workforce, which includes 150,000 employees based in 38 countries over six continents. 

During that time, Rio Tinto was looking for a HR digital refresh, with the COVID-19 pandemic driving the need to revisit its digital strategy and digital collaboration opportunities. 

However, it wasn’t until 2023 when “phase zero” of the project commenced as Deloitte and Rio Tinto engaged in a detailed discovery phase for Workday functionality, which has ServiceNow integration capabilities. 

Speaking at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2025 conference, Rio Tinto IT product owner for HR Service Delivery (HRSD) John Davidson said it was looking for a unified experience running a major core human capital management (HCM) project.  

When the company looked at its scope for its ServiceNow usage, it was initially considered to be tiny. As the project continued however, more problems were identified and expanded into areas such as payroll, task instruction and query and content management.

“We were starting to see gaps and see functions that we needed to get done in a specific way to provide the best service possible to our workforce, as well as group services business functions,” Davidson said. 

Rio Tinto was previously using a legacy ServiceNow system, dubbed the Rio Tinto Ticket Management System (RTTMS), for over a decade, with the mining giant’s manager for ServiceNow Platform, Alex Dunster, stating it was carrying a lot of tech debt. 

“Essentially, the HR capability, along with a whole lot of other capabilities, were built on top of the ITSM module – fully custom, top to bottom, HR capability – which made upgrades very hard and also almost unmanageable more recently,” he said. 

“The program has been critical to making sure we move the workflow and those workloads off the platforms that we can look at getting that platform decommissioned and now we’re on a new platform. We’re able to leverage a lot of new capital capabilities such as analysis moving forward.” 

The project was led out of Australia, according to Deloitte director Douglas Schairer, who also leads its HR transformation practice at Deloitte Australia. Speaking to ARN, Schairer said the project was a collaborative effort between both itself and Rio Tinto. 

“We actually led the engagement out of Australia — all of the core leadership, the actual project delivery,” he said.

“A lot of Rio’s steerco and C-suite live in London, but they actually would come down to Australia for the key milestones and meetings. The go-live celebration, for example – they flew down to Brisbane.” 

In fact, Schairer added that he has been doing projects like these for 10 years, but this was the most unique team structure that he has led. 

This involved a blended team across Rio Tinto’s global operations, a blended team of Deloitte colleagues and its global delivery network in the Philippines as well as Deloitte Australia and New Zealand, in addition to ServiceNow professional services representatives. 

“While that sounds like a large blended team; it was an observation we heard many times that when people joined calls with our work stream, they couldn’t tell who was on what team,” he said.  

“We really led with a one team mindset, where we were all in it together. We were caring for each other and really driving towards that ultimate goal and outcome of simplifying the backpack of leaders’ and employees’ at Rio Tinto.” 

The design process began on what ended up being Rio Tinto’s HRSD during phase zero and was then implemented the next year in November 2024 during the project’s overall go live, which involved further collaboration with employees at Workday. 

Functionality within the new system includes incident summarisation, resolution and AI search, among other features. 

Since the go live, there has also been work to decommission the old RTTMS platform, which is due to take place at the end of May. Dunster said this has been a “massive achievement”. 

“Now, we’re able to explore the possibilities for automation, productivity and user experience,” he added. 

Looking back on the process, Schairer added that it was “super important” that teammates took care of each other and had fun along the way. 

“These multi-year transformations are difficult, they can be stressful and I think we made sure to make those moments along the way to take care and celebrate and really reflect on the journey,” he said. 

Sasha Karen travelled to Knowledge 2025 as a guest of ServiceNow.