Even when organizations are successful using the ServiceNow Platform, they can struggle to expand into areas beyond IT. This happens when business partners (like in Finance and Procurement) have less experience with service management, don’t understand how services can support their business priorities, or don’t see the value that services can bring to them. Given this, what are the most effective methods to gain support to expand the ServiceNow Platform beyond IT?
1. Educate partners and surface use cases
Educate partners on the basics of Enterprise Service Management (ESM), but use that as an opportunity to understand their key challenges and explore potential use cases. You want partners to start asking about potential use cases and pilot activities – any discussion of ESM should focus on identifying use cases for enterprise services that will show value for your partners (for example, employee onboarding for HR). Chief Human Resources Officers, for example, need to provide a service experience that shares many of the same characteristics as ITSM, like robust case and knowledge management. Any discussion you have around ESM should focus on showing parallels, like these, that are meaningful to your partner.
2. Build and run pilots
Build and run two to three pilots around the use cases you identified. Capture success stories from these pilots, which you can use as case studies and references to “sell” ESM to other business partners. Some best practices our customers use to develop pilots include:
- Asking business partners to send examples of SharePoint sites or paper forms used for a specific process. The pilot then shows how these can be delivered as a service in ServiceNow.
- Asking business partners about data they need to track, and then showing how this can be done in ServiceNow in real time, to demonstrate instant value.
3. Market ESM success stories internally
Use company-wide communications such as lunch & learn sessions, webinars, and newsletters to solicit even more ideas for expanding ESM. Make it a big deal: have go-live celebrations, have a theme, create flyers, and so on. You want to get the attention of leaders across the enterprise, so they learn more about how enterprise service management can benefit their business. ServiceNow Champion Enablement is a great resource to get access to templates and tools to support this.
4. Build a roadmap
Create and communicate a roadmap that connects your ServiceNow implementation to enterprise service management use cases – with business outcomes and value made explicit. A roadmap template is available in ServiceNow Champion Enablement.
As you scale, invest in a global ESM center of excellence (CoE) which centralizes and manages the ESM function through dedicated resources (e.g., team, training, etc.). An ESM CoE is ideal for fairly mature organizations, but even smaller organizations can still apply the same principles.
To learn more about this topic, additional resources include:
- Download our Success Playbook Build organizational support for enterprise services transformation available on the Customer Success Center. You can also access our related Success Playbook on How to launch digital business services.
- Our webinar, where we discuss these practices in more detail
Eric Gerstein, Sr. Research Manager, Best Practices Center of Excellence – Customers Success at ServiceNow
