platform part 2

It’s the Platform, Stupid* (Part 2)

February 20, 2024Posted inPlatformNo Comments
* - A play on the famous James Carville quote about the economy, not implying that ServiceNow folks are stupid It’s been a few years since I wrote Part 1 of this article, going through the history and evolution of the ServiceNow platform, and the morphing of the company strategy from platform to product. After working with multiple clients in the meantime, and reading lots of new marketing and going through many platform release upgrades, I thought it time to revisit the subject with new perspective and analysis. A quick recap: In the early 2000s, ServiceNow (nee “Glide”) was envisioned…
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…
State of the State

The State of State

January 10, 2021Posted inPlatformNo Comments
I consider this my first “blog” about a ServiceNow platform issue, but one that formed itself as a customer email back in 2013. In the years since, the problem hasn’t gone away; in fact, it’s only grown as the platform has expanded. Background: Throughout ServiceNow's product history, there have been multiple ways to handle the "state" of a Task and its extended tables. At times, the state field that existed on Task served for all extended tables, and divergent values were done through the Choice list table. Extended tables use the Task level states unless "overridden" by table specific values…