The global market size for Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) is expected to reach a staggering US$ 15.6 Billion by 2026!
From small businesses to Fortune 500 corporations, the rapid proliferation of digital applications across all business units within an enterprise mandates the adoption of a powerful ITSM platform to ensure smooth operations.
One of the biggest names in the ITSM market today is ServiceNow, which offers a range of business workflow management solutions for several industries like education, finance, manufacturing, government, healthcare and telecommunications.
With ServiceNow, the benefits that can be realized by businesses are numerous, but, before leveraging them, it is important for businesses to ensure that they implement ServiceNow following the best practices in implementation.
To help businesses identify and solve problems faster in their daily operations managed by digital applications, it is important to have a well-planned adoption of various ServiceNow functionality. Otherwise, there may be delays in deriving maximum value or ROI from their ServiceNow implementation.
Let’s examine the top five best practices that every business needs to follow while implementing ServiceNow to manage its digital landscape.
Define a Clear Roadmap
ServiceNow will be at the heart of your business’s digital ecosystem and will enable the seamless management of all business applications from a single place. Hence, it needs to be implemented without rush as any gaps in the scope definition for implementation may result in lesser benefits being realized. All business goals and objectives need to be clearly defined. The corresponding applications and processes that support each objective need to be identified and mapped onto a priority list that goes live first on a ServiceNow platform. The implementation should start only after all relevant business processes are fully mapped and dependencies identified.
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An ITSM initiative within an organization is not a part-time or side project that can be implemented with ease by internal teams in their own leisure time. It needs to be seen and treated as a key business KPI and the leadership needs to ensure that the implementation is guided by a specialist ServiceNow technology partner. The partner should have experience in handling similar transitions in the industry and has knowledgeable staff who can identify unique business workflows and create a strategic path for the business to migrate into ServiceNow for their digital ecosystem management.
Understand the Impact
ServiceNow is not a typical IT project for which your systems or IT team has the sole responsibility of implementation and successful operation. Once implemented, all workflows from across your business such as IT, finance, HR, administration and operations would witness their core digital platforms being managed and synchronized on ServiceNow to create a unified experience for the whole business. Hence, stakeholders from all departments and business functions need to be brought together, their ideas, challenges and pain points discussed. Only after that the business leaders should arrive at a common consensus to implement ServiceNow across the organization and ensure that there is no disruption. One of the biggest mistakes several organizations make in this regard is viewing ITSM initiatives as a technology project and making no effort to get all business stakeholders to comment and participate in the transition to the platform for unified operations. Such a disjointed team contribution will certainly pave the way for disruptions and unidentified challenges after the solution goes live, which can create roadblocks and severe cost escalations during rectification.
Effective Configuration
ServiceNow is a universally configurable ITSM platform and gives organizations the flexibility to customize it to any extent. But by going overboard with the customization, there is a risk of making the entire initiative overly complex. Irrespective of your businesses size, ServiceNow should be configured based on your businesses existing workflows and processes after they are aligned to industry level standards. Don’t try to accommodate as many features and customizations offered by ServiceNow without staying in the realms of your business workflows. By going lean on configurations and customizations, your business can benefit from the right size implementation cost and management while ensuring that you start realizing valuable results faster after deployment.
Create Awareness
ServiceNow caters to the entire spectrum of operations within your business spanning departments and sub functions. Hence, your staff needs training on how to best utilize the platform and leverage its unique management capabilities for their respective roles and responsibilities. The focus should be on imparting awareness about how each feature of the platform translates into a business impact rather than creating a learning plan which focuses on teaching staff to use it as an everyday software like email or your company intranet. Every employee needs to be aware of how their individual contributions add up value to workflows managed through ServiceNow.
ServiceNow plays a vital role in helping organizations simplify how work gets done and how disparate digital workflows can be unified for a better experience overall within the business. Deciding to invest in on-boarding the platform is a great choice and gets you halfway through in the journey to realizing the true benefits of digital transformation.
Doing it right and by incorporating these best practices fills the remaining equation.
