"I heard that ServiceNow is a great platform, however, I am not seeing much benefits".
If you are a seasoned ServiceNow solution consultant talking to customers across the industries/across the globe, you would mostly have heard this kind of comments quite often.Just imagine you bought a Aston Martin but instead of driving it where it is meant to be driven, you just drive in your neighborhood. Well that’s how it is when you do not leverage the ServiceNow platform optimally.
As a solution consultant you will want to validate if your customer scenario is any of the following and advise the customer accordingly.
1) Client bought ServiceNow instance for solving some specific use cases and has not leveraged the platform for accelerating overall organization level digital transformation goals.
Picture this – Client is just using ServiceNow’s ITSM platform and the HR department in the client organization is using a different system for HR management like workday/dayforce. If these systems are not connected and are operating in silos, the result is a bad experience for the employee who has to use 2 different systems to solved their problems. This normally ends up in employees calling Service Desk and say "I am confused with what system to go to solves my problems so please help me".
Imagine a solution were your employees are just using your collaboration channels (MS Teams/Slack/Google hangout...etc) and just type their concerns. ServiceNow can act as a platform of platform here connecting its Virtual Agent with collaboration channel, apply NLU and understand what the user asked and then trigger appropriate workflow which connect across multiple systems to solve user problem. Eg: "Whats my vacation leave balance (HR), When is my next regional holiday (HR), Please block a meeting room for me (Admin), I have Covid symptoms (Admin), What’s my status of H1B petition (Global Mobility)". ServiceNow can connect with multiple internals systems and answer above queries and also take appropriate action.
Key Tip : Keep evangelizing about ServiceNow within the client organization and bring more connected use cases across business units/region/systems, which gives a differentiated experience to users.
2) Following old ways of fulfillment . If you migrate legacy processes as is, there is a high probability that you are mimicking the old ways in a new platform.
Picture this - Employees are still using Service portal catalogs to initiate a access management request. This then gets assigned to ServiceDesk which triaged it to L2 application team and finally the L2 team logs into relevant application and gives access. On the surface this appears like a highly matured process. You can push this process to next level of maturity using latest ServiceNow features.
Now re imagine the same use case. The employee take his mobile and type in their MS Teams chat interface asking for Zoom access, ServiceNow push an approval request to his manager again via mobile and once approved it will connect to the requisite application’s access management API and provide access. Such kind of changes will improve most KPIs such as CSAT, ticket backlog, MTTN/MTTR, FCR..etc.
Key Tip: Periodically assess your existing process in ServiceNow and ensure that they are in the right level of maturity. If they are not, then plan for a transformation road map and focus on continuous improvement tagging appropriate KIPs for governance.
3) Client is supposedly on the latest release. But doesn’t see any new capability.
ServiceNow is releasing new upgrades every 6 months and most of the customers at least do 1 upgrade per year. However in most cases these are just technical upgrades. Here the focus is on ensuring that the platform functions as it was prior to the upgrade. As the upgrade comes under operations, a lot of focus is on testing capability that was existing prior to the upgrade to make sure the availability and not necessarily on new capability that is available as part of the new release. The goal of ServiceNow upgrades are to bring more features which accelerate digital transformation and if we are not timely incorporating that then we are always a unhappy customers as I mentioned above.
Key Tip : It is important to keep a budget for incorporating latest features of ServiceNow and also to do back to box on existing functionalities custom build.
As a solution consultant you can follow below 5 simple steps to enable your customers for better utilization of their platform.
1) Do a ticket assessment and identify the Digital Maturity of the client as defined by ServiceNow's digital maturity model (Basic, Productive, Optimized, Transformed across 3 vectors; velocity, Intelligence and Experience) .You can use predictive intelligence clustering for this. As per my experience most of the customers are still in “productive” and they are yet to realize that they can easily move to “optimized” with the features already they purchased within ServiceNow.
2) Once this is done , you can identify the top process transformation candidates.
3) Next, you will need to collaborate with different teams across the client organization and define a transformed process that leverage the latest features of ServiceNow (Most vital steps according to me).
4) Implement the transformed process and set continual improvement process to properly govern and track the improvements (you can use CIM in ServiceNow).
5) Keep iterating steps 1 – 4 so that you are constantly focused on continual improvement as newer releases of ServiceNow become GA.
The article was published by Mr Geo Mathew
Associate Director - ServiceNow Practice ( CoE Lead ), Cognizant Technology Solutions.