Why Drive a Cadillac?

Why Drive a Cadillac? Part 2

April 20, 2022Posted inArchitecture, Business Strategy, Design, Implementation, ITIL, ITSM, PlatformNo Comments
In Part 1, we examined the 5 Tiers of Service Management. This part focuses on the key differences between the tiers. Let's look at a couple of end-to-end processes through the lenses of tier 1 and 5 to illustrate the differences. Tiering Examples 1. User in building 3, floor 2, Accounting department reports an issue with accessing SAP. Root cause is a misconfigured switch port. Tier 1: User calls the Help Desk. A support agent opens a support ticket and does some basic troubleshooting - reboots, logs out and in. After 10 minutes, the agent tells the user they need…
Why Drive a Cadillac?

Why Drive a Cadillac? Part 1

April 20, 2022Posted inArchitecture, Business Strategy, Design, Implementation, ITIL, ITSM, PlatformNo Comments
What do you want out of your Service Management? I had a client recently refer to ServiceNow as a “Cadillac Escalade”, and that they “just needed a Kia”. This is certainly a long way from when I started at ServiceNow in 2010 and the company and the platform was still just emerging from its “gutsy startup” phase. We've now reached the point where ServiceNow has become a “gold standard” in cloud platforms and Service Management, and customers are having to decide if they can afford such a high-end solution. Anyone who has spent time in business realizes that many decisions…
Platform

It’s the Platform, Stupid*

April 20, 2021Posted inBusiness Strategy, PlatformNo Comments
This is the one where I most run the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon. However, I don’t think I’m wrong, and hopefully my explanation bears this out. * - A play on the famous James Carville quote about the economy, not implying that ServiceNow folks are stupid As many know, ServiceNow has been through 4 CEOs: Fred Luddy, Frank Slootman, John Donohoe, Bill McDermott; and as most know, Fred was the founder. Fred at his heart is a developer. (From Broke To Billionaire: How Fred Luddy Built The World’s Most Innovative Company) From Forbes: Luddy hit on a…
Service Requests

Not All Requests for Service are Service Requests

March 1, 2021Posted inBusiness Strategy, ITSM, PlatformNo Comments
This is a topic as old as the ServiceNow platform. Since the initial applications built on ServiceNow were ITSM, from the ITIL framework, Service Request has been a point of interest for years. The generally accepted ITIL definition of a Service Request is “request from a user or a user’s authorized representative that initiates a service action which has been agreed as a normal part of service delivery”. (This differentiates from Incident, in that it doesn’t involve a restoration of Service.) The key part of this is “agreed as a normal part of service delivery”. Companies often struggle with what…