Building the NBA’s Home Court Advantage: Top 5 Winner in ServiceNow’s 2026 Best Employee Experience

Transcript

Christine Morris

Hello and welcome, everyone. Today we're going to be talking about the amazing portal that we partnered with the NBA to build — building the NBA's Home Court Advantage. We've got a few polls if you guys can respond in the chat. We would love to know if you're going to Knowledge this year — just a simple yes or no. We would appreciate it. It's always nice to meet and connect with folks in person.

Christine Morris

While you guys are doing that, I'll introduce myself. I am Christine Morris. I'm a senior director here at Ondaro. I lead our consulting services group and have been working in the ServiceNow ecosystem for well over a decade. The best thing about my job is partnering with amazing clients like Nick from the NBA to build amazing solutions that really are game changers. Game — good one. Nick, would you like to introduce yourself?

Nick Ricciardi

Sure. Hi, everyone. Nick Ricciardi. I head up the IT customer experience here at the NBA. I've been with the league about seven years.

Christine Morris

And Ryan, our amazing designer — you want to introduce yourself?

Ryan Curtis

Sure. Hi, everybody. Great to be here. My name is Ryan. I'm the lead UX designer here at Ondaro. I've been here for about eight years or so. Before that I was working in custom design and development, and before that I was working as a creative in a creative ad agency. So about 20 years of design experience. I'm really honored to be here. The NBA was an incredible partner with us — just like on the court, they are incredible partners and teammates off the court. Really proud of what we created and really excited to share it with you guys today.

Christine Morris

Just a little bit of housekeeping. We definitely want this to be an engaging experience as we go through this. If you have questions, please post them in the chat. If you love what you see, feel free to react. If you need captions, you can click on the more button at the bottom and click Show Live Captions throughout this. So here's what we're going to cover today — talk a little bit about who Ondaro is. We've got an amazing video that Nick is going to share that provides a great overview. We're going to talk about how the Home Court evolved, how they're using Virtual Agent, how they did their launch, the importance of a communications campaign, some lessons learned, and then save some time at the end for questions.

Christine Morris

Many of you have known us as Cask. Today we're Ondaro. Our name and our look are new, but our focus is the same — helping organizations get the most from their ServiceNow investment. Ondaro brings deep expertise across the ServiceNow platform. Our practices are led by seasoned leaders who have actually sat in the seat — been a customer on that side, supported ServiceNow, and grown themselves. So we really do understand the challenges that you face firsthand. On the right you can see some of our core offerings — from business transformation and organizational change management, to a big focus on AI readiness with all the recent news from ServiceNow. We also implement and develop. We've got amazing UI/UX designers like Ryan who helped lead this charge, all the way to steady state support for folks that need that day-to-day engagement from an operations perspective.

Christine Morris

We'd ask you to respond in the chat. Is your organization using a unified portal to deliver services across IT, HR, and facilities? A: yes, we are and we're thriving with it. B: one department is, but there are plans to widen the platform. C: no, but we're looking into it. D: I wish we were, but we're still using the legacy Service Portal. Looks like a lot of people are still in Service Portal or just transitioning. We've got quite a mix. Lots of opportunity — I think this will really help you see what's available from a portal perspective. With that I'm going to turn it over to Nick.

Nick Ricciardi

Before we get to the video, I just wanted to set a little bit of context here. Back in December, the NBA submitted the work that both Ondaro and the NBA did on their Employee Center portal. That work has been advanced to the top five. The winner will be announced at Knowledge on Monday, so we're super excited to see what our results will be. But this was part of our submission. There was a series of stages in which we had to submit, and the final one was the sizzle reel that we're going to see now.

Video Dialogue

Welcome to the NBA. The NBA is a global game. So our offices are always open. After years of legacy system struggles — too many sites, limited search — when the moment matters, Home Court delivers. A centralized destination built on a platform to help our teammates get what they need and keep moving at game speed. Helping teams plan logistics for nonstop, world class events. A modern design reflective of our visual identity, the brand, the game, and our NBA culture. Instant, actionable access to what employees need and what they don't even know they're missing. On me. I'm dancing. So employees can get work done. It's Home Court. Power surge. Sweep this. Nice, I count it. It all paid off. It's really astounding. I had to global. Personalized. Home Court delivers top tier results wherever employees start. Increased unique users globally. Smarter AI-powered results. More favorites. More pages. It delivers for authors — the future of internal communication. With One Touch Publishing. Written, designed and developed once, published everywhere. Virtual Agent trained automatically. The Home Court author experience. Scalable. Future ready. Less maintenance today, ready for tomorrow. The right UI combined with powerful back-end support — working together to deliver top tier results. Home Court delivers for employees, connecting our people to the game so they can bring fans closer than ever, to fulfill the NBA's mission to inspire and connect people everywhere through the power of basketball. Into a monster.

Nick Ricciardi

Obviously makes things easier to produce a technical portal sizzle reel when you have the backdrop of the NBA. Hopefully everyone enjoyed that. Getting started here — one of the things I want to highlight is the why. We were coming up on a renewal of our existing portal. We were already a ServiceNow customer. We were using Service Portal in various areas of the organization and we really had a decision to make — do we go all in on ServiceNow and turn on the Employee Center and consolidate all those portals into one view?

Nick Ricciardi

And ultimately that was the decision we made. We felt it was just the right path forward to leverage the platform for more than just an intranet — leverage it for all our actionable content. This just gives you a little bit of a look back at what we were able to accomplish. Prior to this, as mentioned, we had several portals — one of them being our intranet, which was on a platform called Interact. And there were two lower portals, which was our traditional Service Portal. We were able to consolidate that, improve the UI, make it easier for people to navigate around the site, and ultimately gave a better user experience, which is what we'll walk through here today. Before putting hands on keyboard, we spent time filtering through some of the partners in this space and ultimately selected Ondaro to help us with this work.

Nick Ricciardi

We heard great things about previous portal projects. We had some customer testimonials that we also partnered with, and ultimately made the selection with them. Once we had the partner identified, we needed to start building out our vision. We really spent a lot of time getting feedback from our staff. We knew what the pain points were with the old system. We validated that through a series of different exercises — focus groups, surveys, general feedback. We were very methodical in making sure that feedback wasn't just a box-checking exercise. We really wanted to make sure that feedback made it into the new platform. And we believe we did that with a simpler UI, a mega nav that makes sense, and search — which is always heavily used — making sure it provided the right results. And then we really wanted to leverage other systems of data, whether that's Concur, Workday, or a variety of different systems, making sure that when people landed on the site it wasn't just informational curated content — they were able to actually see actionable content from their other systems.

Nick Ricciardi

Here's a look at some of the highlights of the site that I want to double-click on. On the left screen you'll see what we're calling My Dashboard. This is a series of widgets that brings in actionable information — whether that's my PTO information from our HR systems, Concur for wallet expenses, or a holiday calendar that's been personalized to my location. We're a global business, so if I'm logging into the site I don't want to see a holiday that's not relevant to me. I'm seeing my holiday based on the persona that's logged into the portal. So that was our introduction to the personalization aspect of the work — we spent a lot of time creating those appropriate audiences for that information. The center there, NBA University, is a great representation of what you can do with the hubs and the rich topic editors. ServiceNow traditionally has been pretty vanilla in what you can do on the Service Portal, but with the Employee Center you can see where you can push the boundaries. Being able to leverage great graphics and consolidate the content there makes it a better visual experience. The third one, HR Central, is essentially a topic page that allowed flexibility for HR to use a banner at the top, leverage a carousel, keep their knowledge articles isolated to their department for their relative information, and extend it out to quick links and upcoming events — just extending personalization for the department. And in the bottom left corner is just another view of our navigation mechanism.

Nick Ricciardi

With this project, we knew we needed to launch some version of AI as part of this launch. The work was completed back in August, so if you walk it back, we probably started right around this time last year. This technology has advanced very quickly, but we were still able to leverage Now Assist — both from an enhanced search perspective and from an AI perspective. This has been evolving nicely. We've really tuned this to provide some great results. We're seeing great summarization and good metrics in usage and on the feedback side as well. We launched on August 18th. We have about 3,300 users globally — that includes staff, supplemental staff, and vendors. To get 2,200 unique users in the portal in the first week is pretty incredible, especially given the fact that so much of our staff is transient — they are working games, they don't have assigned seats, and in some cases don't even have assigned laptops, just using mobile devices. So to get that sort of participation in week one, knowing that a lot of people aren't necessarily going to visit an intranet site in a given week, was really great. We've seen a really steady incline in numbers ever since launch, especially in areas of the business that we typically were not able to get adoption from — some of our international partners and some of our other clients around the world. One thing to point out before we go to the next slide is the engagement time — the six minutes per session. This is an interesting project, especially with where AI has been going. People are so used to using a ChatGPT-type window where it's just a blinking cursor in search. We spent so much time organizing our content in a thoughtful way — making sure we were able to both showcase our brand and our employee culture, and also get things done. We want engagement on the site. We purposely made it look and feel a certain way. While search is always going to be the preferred method people interact with content, we really want people to sit on the site. So to be able to accomplish both is pretty great, and we'll continue to drive that engagement with the content.

Christine Morris

Another poll for the folks on the call — respond in the chat. Have you thought about using ServiceNow Pro? A: we're already on it. B: we're looking into it now. C: no, but we are open to it and other platforms. D: we're not close to using any platform at this moment. Quite a few folks that are already on it — I see lots of my friends in this chat, hello to everyone! Looks like quite a few folks are looking into it now. A couple of folks are not anywhere close, but lots of A's and B's.

Nick Ricciardi

Just to add to that — when you start to think through licensing on the ServiceNow side and functionality, if you're planning on wanting to leverage a universal search where you want to pull in content from SharePoint, OneDrive, those types of cloud storage areas, that's where Pro comes in — being able to integrate with some of that content. If all your content is going to live on ServiceNow, then you're probably fine. But just keep that in mind.

Christine Morris

I was going to say the same thing. Let's jump back in. If you want to talk a little bit about your communications campaign — I always say to folks, that old adage: if you build it, they will come.

Nick Ricciardi

Not true. A large part of the success of the project comes down to change management. Even if you walk back to before the project started — when we were debating whether to extend our contract with our existing portal partner or make the pivot to ServiceNow — one of the big things was getting participation from the stakeholders that were going to interact the most with the site. Your communications teams, your HR teams, all the service-oriented businesses — if they weren't on board with the move and the plan, we felt like we weren't going to be successful. So we spent a lot of time getting them involved early. Even before we started work, we were extending webinars that ServiceNow hosts on Employee Center to get people familiar with the terminology. ServiceNow can be a little cumbersome on the back end for non-technical users, so getting them in early made a big difference. And then we were able to kick off our official campaign once the project started. There's a lot of change management that should happen prior to any development work — making sure that people are aware of how this portal is going to change their lives from a content and publishing perspective. With our communication plan, we took an approach of drip content over a particular period of time.

Nick Ricciardi

We started with a 24-second shot clock — keeping with the basketball theme — just a Q&A. Simple things like why are we making this change and what are some of the cool features we expect to see once we go live. It was a way to get our staff engaged early with what we were doing and get them excited about some of the capabilities. Then we followed up with the Go Live email. This highlighted the project as a whole. My boss, the CTO of the organization, provided an overview of the project as well — that was later in that opening week, which we call our SLT video series. That was great, keeping the momentum going — not just at go live, but keeping Home Court in people's awareness throughout the week so that everyone knew this is a new initiative and a rollout that should make your lives easier. And then some of our digital signage — we're a vibrant brand, we're high on our imagery. This was a way for us to showcase the project and get people aware through our digital signage, letting people know what's coming, letting people know it's live, and then continuing to follow up as new enhancements are made. Pretty cool branding — the colors are great. Makes that part of the job easy.

Christine Morris

One more survey — is your current portal driving adoption, engagement, and self-service for your users? A: yes, it drives measurable self-service outcomes. B: somewhat, but not consistently used. C: no, users rely on other channels like phone and email. D: not sure, we don't currently measure it. We've got quite a few A's and B's and some C's. From a ServiceNow perspective there are so many tools, and for many of us — myself included, when I was a customer I was on the platform for a decade, highly customized, features have been introduced — now with the move to AI and the amazing content management that comes with Employee Center Pro and campaigns, we're seeing lots of clients move from just a Service Portal to what Nick has done here and saying this is really a one stop shop. And it's more than just an intranet — so much can happen there.

Nick Ricciardi

The key to any adoption is why is someone coming here, and more importantly, can they take action on something. I think we did a pretty good job of creating a healthy blend of both informational and actionable content. The best example I continue to use is someone coming to put in PTO or submit a laptop request, and while they're there they realize there's a Nike discount active this week. In the old experience, people were going to the IT portal to submit the laptop request or the HR portal for the PTO request — they were essentially missing that promotional content like the Nike discount. Now we've created that single pane of glass for staff to leverage all three of those experiences in one window. Virtual Agent has been great. We're a Slack collaboration office, so our plan is to put the Virtual Agent inside Slack as well, and leverage that as another source of adoption.

Nick Ricciardi

With any project there are things we either did wrong or would redo if we could. Bringing in non-technical staff early is super critical, especially if you are moving from a traditional, non-ServiceNow portal. Communications teams and HR teams are more familiar with a drag-and-drop, intuitive experience. ServiceNow is a little more complicated on the back end — there's a reason for that, because you have scale and can do more. But getting those people on board early makes the go-live transition way easier. You could do all this great customization, have great UI, and it can look fantastic — but if people don't know how to use it, the feedback you'll hear is that it's more complicated than the old one. That's the worst line you want to hear. If you can bring them in early, get them trained, and really let them know how to navigate the site early — and I'm talking about the people who are publishing content — that makes all the difference. We also implemented One Touch Publishing as part of our lessons learned, which was highlighted in the sizzle reel. That allows our staff to create image-heavy content and automatically publish it across the portal, in email, and in Virtual Agent. Anywhere you can simplify the editor experience makes sense.

Nick Ricciardi

Invest time in identifying technical debt versus prototypes. We did a pretty good job managing that, but you can get a little overwhelmed with the cosmetic look of things. You also need to make sure you understand what the back end supports — whether it's a custom experience or more of an out-of-the-box experience. On the AI experience — going back a year, AI was still prevalent but not as much as it is today. We quickly pivoted to Copilot. We added some buttons that are highlighted in that second slide. We're using Virtual Agent, but we also incorporated Copilot into the site. The reason we separated the experiences was to make it crystal clear to our staff — when they're searching Copilot, it's going external. When searching Virtual Agent, that's within NBA curated content. So if someone asks what the PTO policy is at the NBA, they're not getting a hallucination from something that went out to the web and grabbed something that hasn't been vetted or approved. That was a quick pivot we made shortly after go live — within the first 30 days, we incorporated Copilot as a fast follow.

Christine Morris

Lots of great content — questions for us. We've got our designer Ryan here, Nick here, and myself. We can answer any questions you may have about the experience.

Guest

I have a question — it's probably for Ryan, or maybe Nick. I'm a fellow UX designer and curious if your team helps with — or maybe this is internally at the NBA — we're seeing business partners want a little bit more visuals in their knowledge articles. We hear that it's too cumbersome to go and add a table and add an image and link that, to get that more web page experience like we have on our intranet, which is a SharePoint site. Some are wanting those knowledge articles to look a little more visual. Do you have a dedicated design team that helps assist with knowledge article creation, or do you leave it on the different centers of excellence to own and maintain those — especially being a larger NBA brand where you probably want to keep that brand guidance and visual identity intact?

Nick Ricciardi

I can take first crack at that. That was probably the biggest hurdle we had to overcome early on with the project. Once we started to show the back end and allow our editorial staff to put hands on keyboard, they started to call out some of the things you mentioned. With the recent release of the Knowledge Center that ServiceNow has deployed — bringing the rich text editor into knowledge, which was always available on the topic pages and content side — that has made the experience way easier. And I think they know that's been a shortcoming, so they're going to continue to invest in that space. With this recent release I think we've closed the gap a lot. But to your point, I do still think there's some argument to be made that it's a little too complicated at times. Ryan, do you want to add anything?

Ryan Curtis

Not necessarily. A lot of that really does come down to the NBA side — when their folks start building and publishing and migrating all their content over, I'm usually not a part of that. It's on the NBA side to decide what that process looks like, how to plug in imagery and videos, and how to make knowledge articles a little more lively and not so text heavy. I'm sure they have a ton of content people who work together to make sure they're representing the brand correctly. They have to have some kind of governance and control over that when people start creating knowledge articles.

Christine Morris

From our perspective, we typically have business process folks who help with things like taxonomy, templates, and using knowledge blocks so you're getting a consistent look and feel. Knowledge can be one of the most overwhelming aspects — you've got to define the topic pages and connect the content. What we typically do is lead through that process, offer insights and best practices, and also bring in content specialists, because in some instances if you're coming from an intranet you might have thousands of pieces of content. Quite often we find a lot of that to be outdated — people just keep building on the intranet without necessarily taking down old content. So one of the big things you have to do upfront in the intranet space is do an audit. Is this content being used? Is it even relevant anymore? Is it conflicting? Start to parse out what's most meaningful. And the other thing — keep me honest, Nick — that you guys did, especially with the intranet, is recognize that if you've got 15 departments with 15 department pages, trying to bite off all of that at once is quite a challenge. You focused on IT, facilities, and corporate communications to start with that MVP product and then continued to iterate and bring in other departments.

Nick Ricciardi

In that particular context too — if you have ServiceNow reps or implementation partners who can help champion some of that feedback, they took a lot of our feedback early on and I think some of our work has made it into future enhancements. Socialize that with your account execs — say, hey, we really want to go to Employee Center, but these are some of the things that are holding us back. I think they need to keep hearing that it needs to be more of an editorial-type experience. I can just run through these questions quickly if that would be faster than waiting for replies.

Nick Ricciardi

The evaluation period — we spent about four weeks doing that, and that included some of those focus group conversations with our top users on the old portal experience. Once we had that, we went right into the Figma designs and Ryan did a great job producing samples really quickly for us to provide feedback on. We went through that in probably another two weeks. So about six total weeks was focused on the as-is process and setting up that shell for the development work.

Nick Ricciardi

The family of logos — that's what we call them on that site. We did at one point talk about in our project scope having each one of those be a branded site — not necessarily completely different content, but if you were a WNBA employee and logged into the portal, it would be branded more in orange and white and black versus the NBA red and blue. That was something we scoped and moved away from. I think we were being a little ambitious at the beginning, but it's something we always bring back up. On the plugin — we definitely looked at third-party options for this. We engaged with a few different providers of third-party plugins that can help create a better intranet-looking knowledge article experience. But this is why it's important to get feedback directly from ServiceNow account reps and their product team. We asked them what was on their roadmap for knowledge, and they ultimately told us the Knowledge Center was going to be released sometime in Q1 of 2026. So we decided to wait. It wasn't worth the investment to bring in a third party and start building knowledge that way. We lived with some of the more vanilla pages for that short transition, and now we're here and in good shape to leverage it.

Nick Ricciardi

We did a lot of customization around the news widgets and events — we're obviously an event-driven business, and ServiceNow classifies events slightly differently than what a business like ours would typically consider an event. So that was probably the most customization we made. The upper banner carousel we went slightly out of the box, but the majority of the page is pretty close to standard. Ondaro did a great job highlighting the areas where we wanted things done and keeping us in check, making sure we weren't going to take on too much technical debt. On Copilot versus Now Assist — the main differentiator is really just internal versus external. If I'm searching for PTO, the Virtual Agent is just searching knowledge and anything on the site itself. If I go to Copilot, it works the same way Copilot works for any user — it will go out and search the web. That's really the only delineation. It's not too much complex technical work — it's really just a separator to let people know they're going externally.

Nick Ricciardi

On the toolkit — one thing I didn't mention in the presentation is that we had 113 authors in our old experience. We knocked that down to about 24 at go live. What we really did was keep that circle small to make sure we had subject matter experts in that space who understood how to create the content, how it impacts the Virtual Agent, how it impacts events. Since then we've started to roll out toolkits — here is the proper way of doing X, Y, and Z in the portal — and we've expanded out some of our authors. We hold office hours weekly. We have a Slack channel where people can ask questions. And we've created a catalog request item where people can submit to have content published on the site. We've really spent a lot of time on governance, making sure that the experience stays consistent as you navigate around the page.

Nick Ricciardi

We do have universal search that searches SharePoint, and that's governed by data classification. This is an internal site, so we don't get as much exposure to threat actors trying to gain access. To get almost 85 to 90% of the organization on the portal in the first week exceeded our expectations. We were hoping for 75 to 80%, because that's typically where we were on the old portal. To exceed that and continue to keep that steady rate has been great. The one area where we were targeting higher usage is on the mobile side. We just created a browser-responsive app — we were hoping to get somewhere in the 10 to 15% range. We're still in the 7 to 8% range, so that's probably been the only shortcoming from a metrics perspective — not getting that engagement on the mobile side. We do have language translation in the Virtual Agent — I think that was highlighted in the sizzle reel. But the site itself is English only. No current plans to put Copilot within the Virtual Agent — we'll just keep it as a separate button. One thing that wasn't shown — in one of those screenshots, there's an "I Want" button in the upper right corner. That's like your traditional Service Portal. If you want to order a laptop, get access to a Tableau report, do a name change in HR, or request a leave of absence, that "I Want" button gives you all the actionable catalog request items.

Christine Morris

And Nick — they were talking about intake and suggestions, not necessarily the catalog but for the actual content on the portal.

Nick Ricciardi

Yes. We have a catalog request item where you can go and say, hey, I'm hosting a webinar on April 29th, here's the image we want to use, here's a short description of what the webinar is. That gets submitted as a catalog request and our authors pick that up and go publish that content and create the event so people can add it to their calendar. So we do have a content intake form to help people who casually need things posted on the site or need a knowledge article created — they just submit that as a request. On suggestions for design — we recently did a survey a couple weeks back just to get a pulse of what people like and don't like. We're constantly evolving. A project like this, you're never done. The big thing we're trying to do is roll out an enhancement every quarter so it keeps people engaged with new features and they know more things are coming. It's not just roll it out and leave it. We're getting a lot of requests around the calendar — people are using the ICA feature where you can click on an event and add it to your calendar.

Nick Ricciardi

One thing we're working with the dev team on now is how we centrally manage all those invites so that if we want to make a change to a conference room or need to cancel, we want to be able to manage that calendar invite holistically the way it would work if it came from a host. There's no direct integration with Outlook right now — it's just a download ICA — but we are looking at that integration. How large is the internal ServiceNow team? I always love answering this question because the answer is one. We are a marketing partner of ServiceNow and we do a lot on the platform, but we leverage partners like Ondaro and others to really support our needs. But if you have a small team, you can still do it.

Nick Ricciardi

On publisher audiences — yes. We have international employees all around the world. My medical benefits are very different from someone who's in Senegal. So when you log onto the benefits site and click on a benefits section for medical, you will only see yours — and that's coming from the people data and the persona you've logged into the portal with. Our plan is to go even further with publisher audiences because there's still a lot of opportunity for improvement there.

Nick Ricciardi

We did leverage ServiceNow Professional Services to get our Now Assist agent turned on, and then we worked with the Ondaro team to integrate it into the portal. It's pretty plug and play. There are some training actions you have to do, especially with meta tags and things like that, but it's fairly straightforward.

Christine Morris

I think there was one more — I don't know that you answered the question about how do you ensure it's clear to your users when to use the Virtual Agent versus Copilot?

Nick Ricciardi

It just goes back to what we keep telling people — internal versus external. With the acquisition of Moveworks — for those that don't know, ServiceNow acquired Moveworks — that went live a couple months ago, and they're branding the new product as Employee Works. With Employee Works, it becomes very clear in the Virtual Agent experience that you have exhausted all internal content and it asks would you like to search externally. There's an acknowledgment button and when you click yes, it goes external. So that makes that experience way easier. Really we just campaigned early on the differences between the two experiences, and our staff has found it pretty intuitive. We haven't had a lot of questions in that space.

Christine Morris

Let's make sure anyone who had their hand raised got their question answered.

Guest

I did have a question in the chat around communications. I don't know if we touched on it earlier in the presentation — I was looking for any tips and tactics around pre-launch, what you did even before you went live with the new site.

Nick Ricciardi

We knew what the feedback was on our old experience, so we had a good idea of what people liked and didn't like. We really wanted to make sure we got as many voices heard as possible in the feedback session. We extended that through our newsletter — Home Court Advantage — and we were communicating with staff through that even before the project started to seek feedback. As far as communications go, we went straight to the top of a lot of our verticals and made sure we attended department meetings. We socialized what our approach was going to be with the portal. Once we had the Figma design, we went on our campaign while there was still time to make changes — we wanted to make sure people received the Figma design well before we did too much development work. That was really the artifact we used to share across the organization and get people excited about what it would look like. As soon as you get the prototype, do as much campaigning as possible. We have about 500 desk-less employees. We use SDS reservation management for space booking, and we use a product called Umbra — which is basically a visualization where the cube is either green or red and you can walk up, badge swipe, and claim the space. That's all integrated into the platform. If you remember during the sizzle reel, there was a wayfinding view — a map that shows you the floor plan and where the seats are.

Nick Ricciardi

That's just another component. And I think that's really the highlight — at the end of the day, if you can take other portions of the platform and roll them into the Employee Center and tell staff that they can do all these other things besides look up company information, that's ultimately the whole reason you go to ServiceNow Employee Center. If you're not leveraging the other products within the SKU, it doesn't have as much value.

Christine Morris

We're going to wrap up. If you are interested in learning more or would like to partner with us, don't hesitate to reach out — we've got the email here on the screen. For those of you that will be at Knowledge, our booth number is 5520. We'd love to have you stop by and chat with some of our technical folks or architects. We appreciate everyone joining today, and a huge thank you to Nick for his engagement and partnership. We continue to work with Nick — as he said, this isn't a one and done kind of thing. So stay tuned for more. Maybe Nick will be a top ten portal again next year with even more features.

Nick Ricciardi

Thanks everyone for joining.

 

NBA-PDF-cover

 

Building the NBA’s Home Court Advantage: Top 5 Winner in ServiceNow’s 2026 Best Employee Experience

Get an exclusive preview of what the NBA will share at Knowledge 2026.

Join Nick Ricciardi, Vice President and Head of IT Customer Experience at the National Basketball Association (The NBA), with host Christine Morris to unpack the strategy, decisions, and lessons behind Home Court: the NBA’s employee portal designed to deliver a modern, intuitive, and scalable workplace experience.

From rethinking legacy challenges to building a centralized digital hub, this session offers a candid look at how the NBA approached transformation and what it takes to drive real adoption across the organization.

📅 Date: Wednesday, April 29, 2026
🕛 Time: 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET
Duration: 1 hour



What you'll learn

  • The vision behind Home Court and why the NBA chose to evolve its employee experience
  • The challenges that prompted change and how they built alignment across teams
  • How ServiceNow became the foundation for a scalable, unified portal
  • A guided walkthrough of the Home Court experience, including personalization, search, and key workflows
  • Measurable impact across adoption, efficiency, and employee engagement
  • Practical lessons on governance, content strategy, and change management
  • Advice for leaders building or rethinking their own employee portals


Meet the Speakers

Nick Ricciardi
Vice President, Head of IT Customer Experience, National Basketball Association (NBA)

Nick Ricciardi NBANick Ricciardi is a technology executive with over 20 years of experience driving IT strategy and service delivery across global organizations. At the NBA, he leads global IT operations and the ServiceNow platform strategy, focused on delivering scalable, user-centric experiences that align with business outcomes. Prior to the NBA, Nick held multiple IT leadership roles at NBCUniversal, supporting large-scale media and broadcast environments.



Christine Morris
Senior Director of Technical Service Innovation, Ondaro

Christine Morris HeadshotChristine Morris is a strategic IT leader with over 20 years of experience helping Fortune 500 organizations navigate digital transformation. She specializes in governance, compliance, strategy, operations, and procurement, leveraging her business acumen and technical expertise to develop solutions that drive business value. A strong change agent, Christine architects innovative and automated ServiceNow solutions designed to enhance both the end-user and fulfiller experience. With a passion for optimizing IT management and enterprise workflows, she is committed to delivering best practices that support efficiency and growth.


Ryan Curtis
UX/UI Design Manager, Ondaro

ryan curtis headshotRyan Curtis is a User Experience Design Manager at Ondaro with over 20 years of professional design experience, including more than a decade focused on UX/UI. A passionate user advocate based in the Pacific Northwest, Ryan specializes in creating intuitive, human-centered digital experiences on the ServiceNow platform. During his 7+ years at Ondaro, he has led the design of impactful solutions for organizations like the NBA, helping transform complex workflows into seamless, engaging user journeys.

 



Why watch

Whether you are preparing for Knowledge or actively exploring how to elevate your employee experience, this session will give you a clear, real-world perspective on what a successful transformation looks like and how to get there.

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