Take me down to the Enterprise City, where the tech's all cloud and processes are pretty, as Guns N' Roses might have sung and might yet sing someday. We can but hope.
How is an enterprise — your enterprise — like a city? How isn't it?
Both serve multiple sizable and often highly diverse constituencies. Each with its own set of requirements, constraints, and political considerations.
Both depend on the ability to deliver desired and required services, when and where they're needed, effectively, economically, and consistently. Both also often fall short of succeeding at these efforts.
Both rely heavily upon the processes that drive the decisions made about the infrastructures that enable the services. Both are also historically uneven at best at creating, documenting, evolving, managing, and adhering to those processes consistently.
Both rely upon multiple, often chronologically and functionally incompatible technologies to operate those infrastructures. And both have been historically challenged to respond to demands that grow constantly in volume and complexity, with budgets that persistently remain flat or shrinking. Both have therefore been consistently frustrated in efforts undertaken to extend, improve, or modernize basic, critical services, let alone to deliver new ones. Which is why many IT departments are saddled with sobriquets such as "the department of 'no.'"
Fortunately, there is at least one approach to running a modern city that is readily adapted to running an effective modern enterprise, and transforming "the department of 'no'" into "the department of 'now,'" as in "how can we help you now?" And that approach is working pretty darn well.
Where? At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. You may have heard or read about the large hadron collider used to confirm, at least tentatively, the existence of the Higgs boson, sometimes called the "God particle." Or not. But what you may not know is that in 1989, CERN employee Tim Berners-Lee developed the framework for what would become the World Wide Web.
What else you may not know is that CERN is, effectively, a city. It hosts something like 10,000 visiting scientists every year, using a staff and infrastructure that includes everything from IT and HR to plumbing, firefighting, and hotel management services. And the folks who make CERN work and keep it working rely upon two things. One is a solid set of processes. The other is ServiceNow.
The accompanying infographic spells out what they're doing and how they do it. That set of connected circles under the heading "How to Run a Modern City" could just as easily be entitled "How to Run a Modern Enterprise." And the fact that they've built and are running all of the custom applications that make CERN work on the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform speaks for itself. Especially given the volume and breadth of service requests CERN handled in just the 12 weeks illustrated. No wonder CERN won the ServiceNow 2011 Innovation of the Year Award at Knowledge11 Europe.
(click the image for a larger version)
If you want to know more about how CERN is running a city like an enterprise — or is it the other way around? — visit the Customer Success section of the ServiceNow Web site. You'll find a bunch of other similarly impressive stories there as well. (You can even download your very own copy of the way-cool CERN infographic, if you haven't already done so.) Then, you might want to start charting your own path towards Enterprise City — a path that will take you, your IT team, and your enterprise from "no" to "now."
