Regardless of industry and organization size, ServiceNow is an incredible platform to spark and enable digital transformation. And while the platform is a great tool to help your organization run your business, there are some common areas that companies miss when planning out how to leverage and utilize ServiceNow.
However, by incorporating the steps below into your ServiceNow planning process, you’ll be that much closer to reaching digital transformation.
Decide on Desired Outcomes from Implementing ServiceNow
Before beginning the ServiceNow planning process, your organization should compile the key outcomes or problems you’d like to solve and streamline with ServiceNow.
Examples could include:
- Taking steps towards request automation
- Easier onboarding and offboarding for HR
- Comparing the benefits to the costs of business initiatives within your organization
These outcomes and goals become the guiding principles for your ServiceNow roadmap and journey, defining which modules, licenses, or custom solutions to build first for the biggest reward for the effort.
These goals also help your organization determine which department or group would be the best candidate for implementing ServiceNow. However, picking the groups or departments for your organization’s initial ServiceNow implementation may not be as easy as choosing where the most benefit can be found.
Factors like departmental budget and the amount of organizational change can severely impact the first group or department undertaking the digital transformation enabled by ServiceNow.
An important aspect for your organization to keep in mind with the future outcomes and goals is to not only plan for the first few ServiceNow implementations, but also determine how your organization can grow into leveraging ServiceNow completely.
Questions such as:
- What departments can leverage the pre-built modules the best right now? In the future?
- Are there any business functions that could be digitized and automated by leveraging the custom application platform? (More on ServiceNow custom applications here.)
- Should we build up the staffing around the platform? Or, should your organization outsource basic admin tasks to a Certified ServiceNow Partner, like Infocenter in order to get the most value out of the ServiceNow platform without sacrificing resources dedicated to your organization’s core competencies?
Define Metrics of Success for Each Outcome
Once your organization has defined the high-level goals for ServiceNow, you’ll need to define how to track them. Determining the specific key performance indicators (KPIs) for the ServiceNow platform can help track the success of each implementation as well as improvements as time passes post-implementation.
An example of a KPI tied to an overarching outcome is as follows:
Organizational Goal
- Improve the onboarding and offboarding process for HR.
Metrics and KPIs for that goal:
- Completely automate user and email creation and disabling.
- Decrease the number of hours needed in onboarding by 20% in the next year.
- Automatically disable user accounts and access at 5pm for all offboardings.
- Decrease the number of late onboarding tasks by 10% in the next 6 months.
Adding both a quantity and timeline to your ServiceNow goals can help your organization determine if they truly hit those metrics and set realistic expectations for the implementation team, the department undergoing the implementation and the leadership team.
Finally, when determining the metrics to support your organization’s goals and objectives, also determine who can change those metrics. This could be the leader of that department, the product owner of ServiceNow, or a steering committee in charge of organizational change.
Outline Underlying Data Needed for Optimal Success
Once the organizational goals and metrics are defined, the next step is identifying what data is needed to support those metrics and goals. This could be asset data to populate the CMDB, locational data for your organization so that the Customer Service department can better serve your customers, or people information so HR can efficiently answer personnel questions.
Some of these data points may be a one-time import, while others may require an integration into your organization’s system of record. Others can be found by tools within ServiceNow. But understanding where that data is coming from, how ServiceNow will intake and maintain it, and how it will be applied to your organization’s overall success can make the initial step in your ServiceNow planning much easier.
Lay Out Your Enterprise Roadmap
The final step in preparing your organization’s ServiceNow plan is defining your organization’s enterprise roadmap. This is an exercise that combines your organization’s goals, desired outcomes, metrics and underlying data into a format that can keep your organization on track and accountable for its goals.
By creating an enterprise roadmap, your organization will determine which groups or departments will leverage certain modules versus building ServiceNow custom apps on the platform.
Also, by sharing your ServiceNow strategic roadmap across your organization, you can get buy-in from the different teams involved as well as input from leadership on the alignment with your long-term goals.
Choose a Partner
Having outlined the current and future goals, metrics and data needed for the platform, this will ensure that your organization is getting the most value out of its investment. Doing so can be challenging as a first-time customer or product owner of ServiceNow.
Choosing a trusted ServiceNow partner is crucial to help your organization make the most of its ServiceNow investment.
When assessing ServiceNow partners, the first thing to look for is the breadth and depth of their expertise. Having a partner with deep knowledge of the industry and technology, across all modules, gives your organization the peace of mind.
At Infocenter, our team is comprised of former domain executives that are ServiceNow Certified. These experts not only have a deep understanding of ServiceNow, but also extensive domain expertise across all industries.
Another aspect to consider is the range of offerings from partners. Some ServiceNow partners specialize in implementations only and cannot help in the actual planning of the ServiceNow implementation or supporting it afterwards.
By choosing Infocenter as your partner, your organization can rely on our experts’ depth and breadth of industry and platform knowledge as well as know that we will be there to support your organization in planning, implementing, and managing your ServiceNow platform.
Here’s more information on our ServiceNow strategic planning and roadmap (RADIUS™) and our ServiceNow managed services (DEVSHOP™).
Having clearly defined goals and objectives that have been documented and approved for alignment are key elements to continued success leveraging the ServiceNow platform. However, being able to define and understand all the ways your business can leverage the platform can be a daunting task, especially when initially embarking on the ServiceNow journey.
By selecting a long-term ServiceNow partner, like Infocenter, to help your organization design, implement and maintain your ServiceNow platform, your organization will be empowered to meet its long term goals and achieve its overall roadmap with ServiceNow. Speak with a ServiceNow Expert today to get started!
