Maximising your investment in ServiceNow®

Synopsis

  • ServiceNow® is an outstanding platform for workflow automation

  • The market is shifting towards non IT usage of its capabilities

  • The opportunity for growing the platform beyond IT while keeping costs down is ready to be exploited

Put yourself into the role of the ServiceNow product owner who juggles a number of key responsibilities:

  • Look after the products you have purchased from ServiceNow

  • Manage costs - resources and product licenses

  • Manage stakeholder expectations by rolling out new products, features, defect fixes, managing user satisfaction and providing efficiencies

  • Deliver new business initiatives through projects and platform upgrades

  • Manage resources and all the additional overheads this brings

  • Look for new opportunities - delivery innovation, keeping in touch with the marketplace

  • Recognition – after all we don’t do our job purely for fun, we need financial and peer level appreciation

Sooner or later questions will be asked about the value you provide. If you’re being questioned about suitability of the tool, then you’re not accomplishing the objectives you set out with - your tact must shift to maximise your ServiceNow investment.

The Opportunity

The IT opportunity is only 12% of the overall market opportunity for workflow automation. There remains a significant area of IT that is untapped, but the vast opportunity is to automate business processes.

The non-IT opportunity is 80% - you’re just skimming the surface

The non-IT opportunity is 80% - you’re just skimming the surface

Create awareness of ServiceNow and the benefits it can bring and start looking for real opportunities to on-board applications into the platform.

Remember, ServiceNow’s own numbers state that their ESM opportunity is $45B versus the $6B in IT.




Communicate

Communication is critical. Have a regular communication plan to IT and the business, highlight up and coming initiatives, help articulate the wider benefits of ServiceNow directly addressing business process automation and describe the costs savings this can bring through increased efficiencies, better transparency of accountability and reporting.

Plan

Now define a strategy and road map with your team, gain senior manager support though a clear mandate to execute the strategy, and then communicate it though a campaign of webinars, lunch and learn, internal technology events, white papers, corporate intranet presence etc.

Identify

Great candidates to move to ServiceNow

Identify opportunities where business processes that can be easily automated, work with customers to prioritise and agree solutions, self-fund a POC to prove value, and look for cost saves.

Start with simple workflows and incrementally grow.to more involved processes.


Owning ServiceNow cannot and should not be just about core ITSM - show initiative, drive and ambition to extend the platform, address real business challenges and provide real value to your organisation.

You have a powerful tool at your disposal, use it and don’t be left behind.

Shuaib RabbaniServiceNow, ITSM, Service Management, ESMComment