At Knowledge 2019 Shane Carlson and I presented lessons learned from helping customers build their governance and operating model to help enable platform adoption across the enterprise. The recording of this session (CCB1599 - Developing a Center of Excellence to Support your Enterprise) gave prescriptive guidance on how to build an effective Center of Excellence and Innovation guided by scalable governance and organizational alignment required to ensure success. The following lessons learned were shared:
- Have Strong Executive Sponsorship that regularly participates
- Ensure the ServiceNow Center of Excellence and Innovation collaborates with other strategic platform Center of Excellence organizations to drive business outcomes
- Collaborate with Enterprise Architecture and Strategy
- Ensure Close Alignment with Business Units across the Enterprise
- Scale the Center of Excellence and Innovation by partnering with the business, partners and ServiceNow
At the end of the session I recommended customers take advantage of two key workshops (investments by ServiceNow Inspire) to help them on their journey to a scalable Center of Excellence and Innovation. First, was a "Governance and Operating Model Workshop" to help define the guidelines. Second, was a "Center of Excellence and Innovation Workshop" that helped define the organizational change and strategic alignment to build a Center of Excellence. Since knowledge I have run several of these workshops with customers and thought it might be valuable to share my insights to help others on their journey.
First, I found that customers consistently had three key areas that they needed to address in order to scale the ServiceNow Platform as a Enterprise Service Management Platform.
- Demand Management - For many customers I worked with Demand was managed in different silos or "lenses" without executive steering or a common process to prioritize demand.
- Organizational Alignment - For many customers the organization that first implemented ServiceNow was being asked to scale the platform without additional resources or funding. If additional resources were available they might live in different parts of the organization which made it hard for the different groups of resources to work together towards a common goal.
- Strategic Alignment and Definition of Business Outcomes - For many customers I found alignment to the company's strategic priorities was lacking. Furthermore, I found that quantified business outcomes were not defined to measure success or progress that was being made toward corporate objectives.
To help customers with these three areas, I leverage a few templates with some guidance to help customers address these three areas of their Center of Excellence and Innovation Journey.
Strategic Alignment and Definition of Business Outcomes
The first template I leverage is the strategy deck voting activity. This quickly helps to create strategic alignment and define or validate achievable business outcomes.
This gives everyone participating in the workshop the opportunity to add additional business outcomes and have a voice of where the organization is going.
Demand Management
For Demand Management I find a few key activities valuable. First, I share both a centralized and a federated demand model.
Next, I have the workshop participants brainstorm the types of demand they currently fulfill and then we leverage the hot air balloon exercise on what moves them in the right direction to fulfilling demand more efficiently driving larger business outcomes.
Organizational Alignment
Finally, to address organizational alignment I put up a board with all the key roles and definitions and workshop participants put who is fulfilling the role and we discuss if they are doing it well or areas of improvement. This helps drive the discussion of where gaps in the organization exist and what organizational change is required to drive the successful adoption of ServiceNow as an Enterprise Platform.
Summary:
By addressing these three topics as part of helping customers build their Center of Excellence, Governance and Operating Model, Organizational Alignment and Demand Management customers are able to accelerate the value they get from the platform by leveraging their resources more efficiently while accelerating speed of delivery for the business. Most importantly they are able to strategically align to corporate objectives and quantify the value they are and expect to be providing to the organization.
