Maximising your ServiceNow ROI
ServiceNow is undoubtedly the leading platform in IT workflow automation, with a saturated market of customers using its various product. As the platform continues to grow, so do the costs of implementing and using it. Therefore, it becomes critical to maximise your investment in ServiceNow by leveraging the opportunities to automate non-traditional IT and business processes.
The opportunities to automate business processes as workflow in ServiceNow are huge
If you want to become a superhero within your organisation, gain a reputation for innovation, quality, and cost reduction, then evangelising this platform into non-traditional areas is where much of your focus should be. Start working with your customers to identify poorly managed or legacy (EOL/EOS) tools with little structure, adherence to policies, weak reporting, and performance capabilities.
For example, people are filling in spreadsheets, SharePoint forms, or entering information into archaic software, all of which can be automated, managed, governed, and reported in ServiceNow with clear responsibility and accountability at each stage of the process. The market for this type of activity is huge, completely untapped, and accounts for almost 80% of the workflows that ServiceNow can automate.
Hunting candidates for automation in ServiceNow across IT and the business
As an example, in 2015, we engaged with a large global bank that was using ServiceNow for core service management. By working with the product owner and a small working group of business champions, we began an initiative to increase the footprint of ServiceNow and prove that costs and risks would be significantly reduced as a result. We started small to gain momentum and within three years, we had automated some of their most business-critical functions into ServiceNow. For example, the trade exception handling process, which is the backbone of many financial services firms, was fully automated in ServiceNow. All broken trades and settlements were created, assigned, enriched, managed, and remediated in ServiceNow by the operations and middle-office teams. When an external party (counterparty) needed to be involved, we used bi-directional collaboration tools integrated with ServiceNow to easily manage these issues in a secure environment. Almost 80,000 of these trade exception handling records are created every two hours, and all of these are fully managed and reported on in ServiceNow.
Another customer, after seven years of automating business processes across many lines of business into ServiceNow, has reduced their IT cost footprint by almost $25 million a year while increasing their ServiceNow license footprint by only $1M a year. Significant business justification, as the numbers speaks for themselves.
The mantra of maximising your investment in ServiceNow is more relevant than ever.
