Enterprise Architecture Should Drive Your ServiceNow Investment
Addressing service desk needs is important, but there’s greater value when you think more holistically.
While this statement sounds radical, our experience shows that, often, a CIO or IT director brings ServiceNow into their organization to help manage service desk operations. There may be some consideration about additional IT processes, like change management, but in most cases the imagined usage is limited to base IT service management support operations.
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This approach provides a spot solution at best that leaves your organization ripe for technology sprawl and will limit your opportunities to work more efficiently through shared data and integrations. When planning your business case for ServiceNow, look beyond your IT service desk with an enterprise architecture perspective.
The ServiceNow Enterprise Opportunity
For many organizations, budgets are tightening, competition is increasing and operational risks emerge daily. Leaders are forced to make decisions about things like strategic portfolios, application rationalization, asset purchases and contracts, resource management, prioritized technology investment, and customer service. Often, a decision about one of these elements depends on information from one or more of the others.
If one platform can support each of these business practices and serve as a single pane of glass to support multidisciplinary decision-making, why limit it to one department? ServiceNow is a pricey investment, but one that can pay dividends if it is recognized and managed as an enterprise platform. The organizations that realize the most value from ServiceNow build their processes and structure their data to take advantage of multiple platform capabilities.
Planning with ServiceNow in Mind
Implementing and adopting ServiceNow takes significant effort. Understandably, you may want to start small, such as scoping an IT focus – we endorse that approach. However, when planning a ServiceNow adoption – and even if you already have ServiceNow in your IT shop – we encourage you to socialize the investment and the platform capabilities with other business leaders. Look for areas in the organizations that can benefit and build a platform governance program and roadmap. As business partners present future demands for process automation and data integrations, consider whether ServiceNow can support those needs as a complete enterprise operations platform.
Even if it will be years before you expand ServiceNow beyond an IT service management implementation, anticipating the potential lets you configure your platform environment and data for future opportunity. If you assume that ServiceNow will only ever be an IT solution or only account for the current scope, you are likely to make configuration decisions that will require future rework in case of an expansion.
Final Thoughts
With the integration of business operations and shared services, organizations should plan for their solution investments to support all aspects of enterprise operations. So, yes, absolutely equip your IT service desk with ServiceNow, but don’t buy ServiceNow just for your service desk.
