A Great Tool in Tough Times...

[SlightlyLoony]

On the way to work this morning, I pondered a conversation I'd had over the weekend with Mark R., a friend who is responsible for IT at a medium-sized company in the financial services industry. Mark is under intense pressure to reduce his department's expenses, and at the same time he's got an ever-growing list of "must do right NOW!" projects, many of them related to the turmoil in the markets right now. On the long list of things he knows he needs to do is to get answers to these two seemingly-simple questions: (1) What stuff does my department have? (2) What's it being used for? The answers to those two questions will give him the information he needs in order to make intelligent proposals to his boss, and to be able to answer his boss' questions (like "How many of those $4,000 laptops do we have, anyway?").

Mark's company doesn't use Service-now, but he knew I worked on our Discovery product — so he called me looking for advice about to approach his problem. He'd been out looking at standalone Discovery products, and he was dismayed by what he found. First, they were expensive — very expensive. Second, they were major projects in and of themselves. Third, and perhaps worst, from his perspective, none of the products were integrated with his existing incident system, or any other system in his shop — instead, those products would be an isolated "silo". There would be yet another user interface, yet another database, and yet another group of his people with specialized expertise. Mark's reaction to all this was to start looking at manual inventory, updated quarterly — and to call me.

All of which got me to thinking as I drove along the freeway — Service-now's Discovery product really is a great tool in tough times. For starters, it costs very little compared with the alternatives. Implementing it is a snap — a Service-now tech simply enables it in your instance, and then there's a simple setup procedure. Some customers have been up and running in just a day or two. Others with more complex environments might take a little longer — but deploying our Discovery is very simple for everybody when compared to the alternatives. And best of all, it's a completely integrated part of the Service-now product — it's the same user interface, the same database, and the same expertise needed by your people.

When you've got Discovery running in your Service-now instance, you can confidently answer those two questions Mark had. You'll know exactly what stuff you have — servers, workstations, laptops, network printers, routers, switches, UPSs, and more. You'll know what software is running on what systems. You'll know what those systems are used for — and not just (for example) that server X is running Microsoft SQL. You'll also know that server Y, running Peoplesoft, depends on the Microsoft SQL running on server X. In short, you'll have the information you need to make those smart proposals to your boss — and you'll be able to answer his probing questions. This is good for your company … and good for you, too!

So what did I tell Mark? What do you think I told him ?