Right Sizing ServiceNow Governance

[Chris Pearson]

Without proper platform governance, your ServiceNow instance can quickly spiral out of control leading to poor performance, low adoption rates, security risks, and high maintenance costs. In extreme cases, lack of proper governance can lead to a costly project to restart your ServiceNow journey by walking away from your existing instance and re-platforming onto a new green-field OOB instance leaving your technical debt in the rear window. I know because I've lead multiple projects to do just that for clients. How do we ensure these awful things don't happen? The answer is finding the right size of platform governance for your organization.

I say 'right size' because there are a lot of ServiceNow customers out there with vastly different organizational footprints. If you search for the ServiceNow published white paper on best practice platform governance, you'll find an incredibly detailed series of governing boards, their purpose, their members and how they communicate with one another. To follow this best practice method of governing your ServiceNow investment requires a large organizational footprint. But what if you simply don't have the personnel for this formally established model?

Let's boil governance down to its desired outcomes.

• Common method of reviewing demands from the business
• Elimination of unnecessary customization and technical debt
• Coding and development best practices enforcement
• Multi-year roadmap and planning output aligned to desired business outcomes

These outcomes are generally produced by the existence of our three governance committees: Demand, Technical Review and Executive Steering. In the next series of blogs I'll propose approaches to accomplish these outcomes without being a global behemoth of a company with enough staff to take on the full throated approach to platform governance that ServiceNow lays out in their formal white paper. Stay tuned!