Lenore has a young team and an aging Service Management system. She introduced me to Thad, a long-hair from the help desk with the state of Missouri tattooed on his forearm. I watched over his shoulder as he entered tickets. He looked as comfortable as a fish in a net. He scowled at the monitor and asked poignant questions like "why does it take seven seconds to set caller location? Dude hasn't moved in a decade!" I'd slit both wrists before swapping roles with Thad. It shouldn't be that hard. Lenore agreed.
Senior management gave her the Heisman when she introduced the organization to a modern IT platform. Thad nearly quit. Lenore coaxed him back. She had a plan.
Turns out the marketing department needed to replace a Lotus Notes app used to manage events. It was written in Visual Basic in 1997 and looked like a green-screen version of Pac-Man. Georgio, event coordinator, told me "nobody uses it but management pretends we do. We mostly use sticky notes." Lenore saw an opportunity and asked the VP if her team could replace it with an alternative to Notes (both the Lotus and the sticky kind).
Three days later they previewed a new events app developed in ServiceNow with a few simple forms, an Exchange integration for the marketing calendar, an Access integration for venue lookups, an SLA timer, interactive calendar, and Gantt chart. Three days after that Lenore received a bouquet with a hand-written note from the VP of Marketing: "These are for the next three apps I need you to build. My team's productivity just tripled and you saved me $300k on custom development. Thanks!"
Lenore took the note to the Infrastructure Management team that rejected her initial attempt at modernizing ITSM. This time they gave her an hour at the next IT all-hands to demo the events app. She did that... then had Thad show a side-by-side comparison of closing a help desk ticket in ServiceNow vs. the legacy HP system.
In less time than it took to log a call with HP Thad showed how he could create knowledge, update stakeholders on a watchlist, post a solution to the company's Live Feed, and propose a change to a CI that alerted the service owner. He then responded to a cynical question about benchmarking data by creating a custom KPI and adding it to a CIO dashboard. COBOL programmers in the audience rocked in fetal position. Everyone else gave Thad a standing ovation.
That was last year. They now use ServiceNow for Service Level Management, Service Catalog, and IT GRC. Lenore and Thad love work more than ever. And her journey is just beginning.
