ServiceNow has evolved drastically over years and is consistently improving to meet growing business needs and help organizations stay relevant in the marketplace. Organizations can get tremendous benefits by implementing ServiceNow and can transform the way they run their operations across departments. But many times, when organizations are utilizing the ServiceNow platform, they may not have complete visibility over their level of license usage, how users are making use of deployed features, and whether they are spending unnecessarily on specific capabilities. Therefore, to ensure organizations are utilizing their ServiceNow platform to its fullest potential and realizing maximum value from their investment, an assessment is imperative.
Realizing Value from ServiceNow Investments
A platform utilization assessment helps understand how an organization can improve its ServiceNow platform utilization and identify the underutilized functionalities. If they’re not getting the desired value, they need to understand what they should change or incorporate to realize maximum value from their investment. A one-size-fits-all approach would not work to assess ServiceNow platform utilization for every organization. Having a personalized assessment plan to optimize platform utilization based on its unique business requirements is the way to go. Here is a 3-step approach that organizations can adopt to enhance their ServiceNow platform utilization and implement solutions to get the expected value out of it:
1. Identifying Areas of Improvement
The first step in platform utilization assessment is identifying those capabilities within the ServiceNow platform that require enhancements and what business value organizations expect from it. Working haphazardly can make it difficult for organizations to make the necessary changes.
For example, if the organization had implemented ServiceNow in the early years based on its initial requirements, meeting its present-day business needs with the same ServiceNow functionalities or features may not be possible. They may have to remove, replace, or add relevant functionalities to meet current market requirements. In such cases, it is crucial to comprehensively analyze platform utilization, considering ServiceNow’s current capabilities in helping the organization enhance its productivity and performance. Organizations need to employ an expert governance team and enable them to collaborate with every stakeholder, such as business unit leaders, service managers, and so on, involved in enhancing ServiceNow platform utilization.
2. Setting the Required KPIs
The next step involves setting up the required (only) key metrics and KPIs that can help you make the changes or improvements. The KPIs, such as improving IT efficiency, enhancing agent productivity, etc. need to be set based on the organization’s requirements. Including unnecessary KPIs or metrics can cause the opposite effect–hinder operational performance. There may also be essential out-of-the-box ServiceNow capabilities that organizations are not utilizing properly. Putting these capabilities to use should be a priority to ensure better platform utilization.
3. Communicating to Stakeholders and Managing Changes
Once organizations have understood what changes are needed to improve their ServiceNow platform utilization, it should be communicated to the stakeholders for further decision-making. The process managers should make sure that the requirements and the organizational value behind those changes are communicated properly. Ineffective communication can confuse and bog down stakeholders, leading to poor decision-making and platform performance. This is also necessary to create a proper OCM strategy and ensure that the changes are managed properly and don’t disrupt other core business operations.
ServiceNow Platform Utilization - Maturity Levels
Here are the 5 maturity stages of ServiceNow Platform Utilization.
Stage 1 – The first level is “Reactive”. In this stage, organizations would have siloed processes and work without any planning and strategies. They may not have clarity on their tools and their capabilities.
Stage 2 – The second level of maturity–Emerging Discipline–is where organizations have implemented appropriate processes and would be able to tackle whatever comes their way. They would have a considerable understanding of the tools that they possess.
Stage 3 – The third level of maturity is “Initial Integration”. At this level, organizations would have an extensive understanding of their tools and processes. They would be able to optimize organizational productivity and deliver the required services to their customers seamlessly.
Stage 4 – The next stage of maturity is “Effective Integration”. At this stage, there is better management of tools and processes within the organization. They would be able to ensure better compliance and proper integration with third-party tools.
Stage 5 – In the final stage–Effective Innovation–organizations would be proactive in their approach and have expert management in place. They would be able to easily change their processes whenever they have new requirements or there are mishaps.
Focusing on License Optimization in ServiceNow
License optimization is an essential branch in the ServiceNow platform utilization tree and organizations must make sure that they utilize their current licensing effectively. This can include ensuring better user management–optimizing the user roles (what kind of job a user does) defined within the ServiceNow platform by the organization. ServiceNow Performance Analytics, a smart reporting application, plays an important role in license optimization and user management. Here is how it helps organizations:
User and Role Management – ServiceNow Performance Analytics
- With the ServiceNow Performance Analytics application, organizations can get access to reports on licenses utilized and easily understand how user roles are defined within the platform. They can also understand how long users are active on the ServiceNow platform and optimize user roles effectively based on their active status.
- For instance, a particular user, who is not a part of the ITOM team, may still have access to the roles in that team. Organizations can easily solve or optimize such user issues and remove unused licenses with the reports generated on the ServiceNow Performance Analytics dashboard. They can prevent users from accessing all the functionalities in the platform and limit them to specific capabilities based on their roles. Preventing the use of multiple applications for the same purpose or business objective across departments is yet another benefit of utilizing ServiceNow Performance Analytics.
The Way Forward
Assessing ServiceNow Platform Utilization and ensuring that it is optimized according to business requirements is essential to eliminate unnecessary costs. If this process of analyzing and enhancing platform capabilities seems like a tedious task for the internal team of an organization, employing external ServiceNow experts can be beneficial.
KANINI, a ServiceNow Premier Partner and a Managed Services Provider, has ServiceNow certified experts who can help organizations ensure effective ServiceNow Platform Utilization and take care of the entire enhancement process. Want to know more about how we help organizations make the best use of their ServiceNow platform? Reach out to our experts.
Author
Joshua Smith
Joshua is a process improvement thought leader and digital transformation expert at KANINI. Over the past 15 years, his focus has always been on achieving organizational maturity and enhancing business processes through implementing tools and workflows to drive transformation initiatives. With experience in multiple verticals from – manufacturing to healthcare, Joshua brings a practitioner’s perspective when working on business solutions and goals to allow him to advise and guide on industry and process best practices.
