Version 2 download link: Digital Product Value Stream Management Architecture Blueprint v2
Version 2 release notes: Digital Product Value Stream Management Release Notes v2
Document download link (pdf) - version 1 RC1: https://hsview.servicenow.com/viewer/63bee8d85b1df696b67d8824
Before introducing this blueprint, I would like to thank our team of domain thought-leaders who all strongly supported to prepare this first version of the blueprint: Aurora Gaimon, Dennis Kuipers, Magnus Nilsson, Yoav Boaz, Richard Hawes, Richard Hunt, Colin O'Brien & Anthony Angelo. I would also like to give special thanks to Tolga Tutel & Dave Armes for your Enterprise Architecture leadership with unwaning trust, support and inspiration.
ServiceNow’s Goals & the Blueprint’s Objectives:
- Meet our customers where they are, and help them to mature in value stream management
- Help our customers focus on business outcomes while reducing costs
- Enable customer teams to stay in their tools of preference, but proactively avoid disruption across the entire value stream
- Improve all value stream roles’ experience and productivity
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to your ServiceNow Impact/Client team and/or reach out to our partner eco-system across the globe for assistance: https://www.servicenow.com/partners/partner-finder.html
Introduction & Context
Value stream management is a practice that originated in the manufacturing industry, with the goal of optimizing the flow of value through the production process. It involves mapping out the steps that go into creating a product or service, identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and implementing improvements to reduce waste and increase speed.
In recent years, the principles of value stream management have been applied to non-manufacturing industries as well, including software development and other business processes. This is particularly relevant in today's business environment, where the ability to rapidly respond to change and deliver value to customers is more important than ever.
Agile practices, such as Scrum and Lean, have also emerged as popular approaches to value stream management in the business world. These methods emphasize frequent iterations, continuous improvement, and collaboration between teams, all of which align with the principles of value stream management.
By focusing on the flow of value through the organization and continuously seeking ways to optimize it, companies can increase efficiency, reduce waste, and better serve their customers. Value stream management is an important practice for any organization looking to stay competitive in today's fast-paced business landscape.
State of Value Stream Management 2022
Credit & Source: https://www.vsmconsortium.org/the-state-of-value-stream-management-report-2022
VSM is crossing the chasm
“Our data shows that few organizations have completed all steps in the implementation roadmap, and a quarter have not yet started. This aligns with the narrative from our community—that VSM is at the early market stage with innovators (tech enthusiasts) and early adopters (visionaries) currently leading the march. To reach the early majority (the pragmatists) we need cross the chasm.”
Team Types & Alignment to Value Streams
“The momentum towards the alignment around value streams has grown since 2021 by more than 4%—and we’ve seen a 10% drop in teams having no alignment to a value stream. We also saw an increase in organizing as shared service teams or teams that cross value streams—supporting multiple value streams.”
“Adopting VSM is an evolution in how teams design, develop, release, manage, and govern products and services. Organizational design influences success. Once the vision for what VSM will deliver is established and the value streams have been identified, the next step is to actively engage and operate within those value streams. This means moving away from the traditional hierarchical and siloed way of working, and organizing around value streams to optimize it as a whole, holistic system.”
“The trend we observed this year suggests that those who were piloting tools last year, have now moved into implementation. Overall, the percentage of respondents piloting, implementing or considering VSMPs has increased from 6% to 36%.”
“A platform may seem like yet another tool to buy and implement, but it optimizes the existing investments that have been made. It makes insights visible to the teams so they can rapidly self-discover, implement, measure, and share flow improvements. It consolidates tools and helps large organizations where tool heterogeneity, duplication, and drift all increase complexity.”
ServiceNow’s Approach & Value Proposition
For enterprises undergoing digital transformation, ServiceNow can implement VSM best practices by mapping, visualizing, measuring, and governing business value flow for digital products and services through a powerful, single platform.
What makes the ServiceNow approach to VSM different is enterprise scale and scope: ServiceNow uses the Now Platform to combine data from ideation through production usage with work we already manage, to provide unique insights and improve digital product lifecycles with role-specific UXs to improve everyone’s experience, increase visibility and manage risk to deliver business outcomes faster while reducing costs.
ServiceNow products and the platform work together with integrations into third parties to fulfill the wide variety of activities that comprise VSM. This means that you can leverage what you already have in ServiceNow and start wherever it makes the most sense for your organization. This blueprint provides full details on how those VSM capabilities are delivered.
Blueprint Walk-Through
Digital Product Data Backbone (CSDM)
Data integration and alignment is one of the most critical components of value stream management because it allows organizations to bring together data from different sources & disciplines and use it to gain a holistic understanding of your value stream. This understanding is essential for identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the value stream, and for developing strategies to improve flow and reduce waste.
For example, data integration can help an organization to:
- Identify dependencies between different activities in the value stream, and understand how disruptions in one area can affect other areas
- Monitor the performance of different parts of the value stream in real-time, and identify opportunities for improvement
- Analyze the impact of changes to the value stream, such as process improvements or new technology implementations, and understand their effect on key performance metrics such as lead time and cycle time
ServiceNow, therefore, uses the Common Service Data Model (CSDM) as a standard and consistent set of terms and definitions that span and can be used with all ServiceNow® products on the Now Platform®. These terms and definitions form the basis for the CSDM framework; feel free to check out our advisory whitepaper where we go explain in more detail how to best use CSDM: (https://www.servicenow.com/community/common-service-data-model/it-is-time-csdm-4-0-draft-white-paper...).
Overall, in summary, data integration is a key enabler for value stream management, as it allows organizations to gain a comprehensive view of their value stream and make informed decisions about how to optimize it.
Short DPM Introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Sa83OPNLuI
CSDM Trainings: https://www.youtube.com/@ServiceNowCommunity/search?query=csdm
Product: Application Portfolio Mgmt.
Business issues:
- High technology cost e.g., due to redundant and obsolete apps & lack of infrastructure mapping
- Poor business alignment
- Increasing risk to the business e.g., due to end-of-life technology and lack of transparency on where sensitive business data, exists & flows through.
Solution: Eliminate risk to cloud migration failures by identifying and creating a roadmap for applications and their dependencies. Businesses can reduce costs by mapping applications to business capabilities and eliminating redundant applications. This helps with a successful cloud strategy by having an accurate picture of capabilities & the stack that supports them before moving applications to the cloud.
Outcome examples1:
- 3x number of transformation initiatives supported in the first 9 months
- 99% reduction in time to do control certification
Product Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW_ZOcXGZSA
Product: Strategic Portfolio Mgmt.
Business issue: “By 2025, 70% of digital investments will fail to deliver the expected business outcomes in the absence of a strategic portfolio management approach.” Gartner 2021
Solution: Maximize cloud outcomes by aligning strategy and delivery to maximize business outcomes. Create a roadmap for strategy, align initiatives, and enable teams to deliver cloud migration initiatives faster with visibility into financials, resources, and timelines impacts. Close the gap between strategy and delivery.
Outcome examples1:
- 90% strategic work on time & on budget
- 20-50% reduction in PMO support
- 32% of work done is agile/hybrid
Product Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p6fzzujH5E
Product: DevOps Change Velocity
Business issues:
- Poor time to value
- Lack of visibility & traceability across the whole value stream
- Lack of compliance and too much time spent on manual tasks and spreadsheets
Solution: Connect the world of DevOps by connecting the pipeline tools developers are already using. We gather information from every step of the journey (user stories, code commits, configuration changes, testing, etc.) and link the breadcrumbs so you know what changed and why. Policies can be applied to prevent changes to code or infrastructure that might cause problems.
Outcome examples1:
- Automated change reviews (10 mins to <1 min)
- Eliminated deployment handover to operations (30 mins to 0)
- Approval duration reduced from 30 mins average to <1 min.
Product Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcON3o2WAzQ
Chaos Engineering with Gremlin (10 min): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj5xMGgoyaw
Product: Lightstep Observability
Business issues: Keeping digital services running reliably across hybrid cloud-native estates.
Solution: Immediately identify and understand every change in complex cloud-native apps to:
- Mitigate business disruption
- Improve developer velocity
- Improve operational cost efficiency
Outcome examples1:
- 92% reduction of MTTR
- 1000x of developer hours saved per month
- 75% improved end-user performance
- 20x faster root cause determination
- 100% visibility across 1700 microservices
- 95% reduction in logging costs
Short Observability Explainer (3 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogODxiadKTw
Change Intelligence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVaXsWnmTcw
Distributed Tracing & OpenTelemetry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv98hU3nj0U
Product: Security Operations (DevSecOps)
Business issues: Rapidly expanding attack surface & overwhelming volume of threats
- 87% of organizations experienced an attempted exploit of an already-known, existing vulnerability
- 280 days average time to identify and contain a cyber-breach
- ~$4M average cost of a breach in terms of losses and remediation
Solution: Overcome threats and vulnerabilities with SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) and risk-based vulnerability management.
Outcome examples1:
- 3x Security Analyst efficiency
- 85% “mean time to contain” improvement
- 80% reduction in open vulnerabilities
- 8’700 hours saved annually via automation
- 25 times faster vulnerability response with automation
Vulnerability Response Product Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3nOw-FtEKA
Security Incident Response Product Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eggnP1LnFs
Product: Cloud Governance & Provisioning (Multi-Cloud Platform Engineering)
Business issues:
- Out-of-control cloud costs
- Inconsistent cloud configurations creating compliance risk
- Lack of visibility into hybrid services comprising of cloud & on-premise resources
Solution: Modern businesses in any vertical are adopting cloud for spurring innovation with quick results while also reducing costs and effort on the Infrastructure & Operation side. However, it is important here to understand that there is a shared responsibility when it comes to cloud – while the cloud vendor offers a plethora of service offerings and security, corporate IT and app teams in the enterprise must ensure that they are following the right approaches to optimize cloud usage without exposing security holes and over-spending.
Outcome examples1:
- 3 days to 1 hour reduction in cloud service delivery time
- Business hours scheduling to reduce the cost of running resources during off-hours
- 12000+ governed operations over 2 months saving many 100s of hours for a customer in doing this manually
Cloud Configuration Governance Product Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XERLhm7Sczg
Cloud Migration Workspace Demo (6 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZpIpFKAej8
How to gain business context of your cloud resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FrOb0JWhKw
How to plan cloud migration & manage cloud security posture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXRk_NbnunY
Product: FinOps (Cloud Insight)
Business issues:
- Oversized resources: ~40% of workloads are oversized
- Unused resources: ~ 30% of cloud subscriptions are either underutilized or unused
- Lack of full cost visibility: Lack of full spend & waste visibility
- Prepurchase & spend agreements: Reserved compute & savings plans being used improperly
- + manual corrections of these issues are slow or stall corrective actions
Solution: Discover your cloud resources, and break down cloud spend by cost center, business service, and other entities. Provide recommendations to reduce cloud spend across various clouds and automate repetitive cost optimization tasks.
Outcome examples1:
- $2.5M unmanaged spend detected
- $500k rightsizing savings
- $170k savings from unused machines
- 30% reduction in compute capacity
Short Product Overview (8 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr_z02_FcLc
Cloud Infrastructure Cost Optimization Product Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tUBEnVJ2kI
Product: DevOps Config
Business Issue: With the maturity and prevalence of automated testing and security scanning tools, configuration changes are increasingly the most likely remaining cause of outages. Configuration changes cause >45% of microservices outages
Solutions:
- Apply common pipeline principles already in use for code testing and security scanning to config data
- Add config data to an E2E audit trail that correlates pipeline, releases, and incidents to eliminate manual audit data collection
- Keep developers working in their DevOps tools while automating config management processes
Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77icBU3hXgw
Product: Customer Service Management & BizOps
Business Issues:
- Siloed teams and systems lead to slow issue resolution time
- Inefficient processes raise costs & create poor experiences
- Service differentiation is vital to compete & accelerate growth
Solution: Transform operations and empower value stream management collaborators to address customer needs quickly & proactively. Solve issues by connecting the entire organization.
Outcome examples1:
- 93% reduced case volume
- Automated 91% of batch payment exception resolutions
- 43% reduced daily ticket volume
- 75% lower customer response times
- 90% reduction in complex order processing time
Proactive Customer Service Product Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT8TEiuCFa4&list=PLkGSnjw5y2U5A4bEpiY-vvAI3221JN04q
Customer Project Management with Field Service Management: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECoO3k0Wmko
ServiceNow Voice with Amazon Connect Short Overview (4 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wBEOjlgyfE
Product: GBS/IT Service Management
- Business Issues:
- High cost of G&A (including IT) services
- Too much manual work and low service agility
- Poor employee experiences and service quality
- Low business alignment and resulting value
- Lack of synergy maximization across team silos and disciplines
Solution: Deliver resilient enterprise G&A services that increase productivity and create amazing experiences wherever your employees work.
Outcome examples1:
- 1.2K hours of monthly triage savings, enabling IT to focus on more value-add work
- 50% reduction in workload due to self-service
- 1,000 incidents auto-assigned daily and with 80% accuracy
- 400+ critical business services in one place for 380K workforce
- 40% of P2P requests automated by ML
- 30% Increase in NPS
- 66% self-service
Employee Center Overview (8 mins): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2ar5S3n-es
Product: Service Operations
- Business Issues:
- Siloed service, centralized operations & distributed teams
- Increasing demand and rate of change
- Labor-intensive, inconsistent, incomplete, inaccurate, and out-of-date technology inventory
- Lack of business context of alerts with limited or out-of-date service maps, to better prioritize the most urgent business issues
- An uncorrelated flood of alert noise from various monitoring tools, causing potentially duplicate work
- A growing number of resources across on-premises & cloud
- A growing number of incorrect or missing cloud resource tags
Solution: Whether moving workloads to the cloud or managing multi-cloud resources, containers, Kubernetes clusters, and tags, get a complete picture under one platform. Technology teams can view dependencies among resources, services, and applications, along with incidents, alerts & changes, helping distributed teams troubleshoot issues and reduce resolution times significantly. Modernize centralized technology ops with visibility, insights, and intelligent remediation. Identify and solve issues before they occur with cross-team automation workflows.
Outcome examples1:
- 100% of assets identified & fully audited
- 97% of discoverable assets are managed by discovery
- 45% reduction in MTTR
- <1 minute from alert to the incident
- 140 business services mapped in a hybrid environment
- 99.8% noise reduction
- 2500 tag-based application services
- 100K user transactions processed per second at peak time
Service Operations Demo @Microsoft (5 mins): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6981558863850307584-A6ru?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_...
Cloud Native Operations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eh21PyFMKw
Product: Integrated Risk Management/Operational Resilience
- Business Issues:
- The pace of change continues to accelerate
- Cyber-attacks continue to increase in quantity and sophistication
- Increasing/changing regulatory regulations
- Brand reputation risk arising from insufficient service stability
- Increasing technology complexity
- Work from anywhere challenges
Solution: Power your resilient enterprise with automated risk-informed decisions embedded in daily work.
Outcome example1: 99% reduction in time to do control certification
Summary
This is the first version of our digital product value stream architecture blueprint, so we are keen to learn how helpful it might actually be/become and how we can continue to improve it. We are keen to continue listening to our customers and getting ongoing feedback of how we can continue to improve our offerings to offer the best value to our customers. We will keep updating this blueprint but please do check out https://store.servicenow.com for regular product releases. The published link at the top of this article is also going to be renewed once new versions are published.
Please also feel free to provide direct feedback and improvement ideas in the comments below. We appreciate all feedback. Stay hungry and humble!
1 Sources available upon request – please reach out to your ServiceNow representative and/or check out our value calculator for a bespoke estimation for your organization: https://www.servicenow.com/success/value-calculator.html
