I'm still here after five days!

[SimonMorris]

Hello there,

My name is Simon Morris, the newest member of the Application Development team at ServiceNow in London.

Previously I was a ServiceNow customer (read on below...) and a certified Community lurker - I thought it might be time to actually step forward and contribute some content - you know, now that the company pays my food and beer bill on a monthly basis.

I've come into ServiceNow after a 8 year stint working in a large Advertising, Marketing and Media group - actually perhaps *the* largest group of it's type globally depending how you want to measure it.

I had a few roles in that organisation, most recently as "Head of Operations and Engineering" for it's UK shared services division. I'm proud to say that I left the organisation in a better shape than I found it in, and the single major influence in it's transformation was the adoption of IT Service Management.

We spent a few early years with the uncomfortable feeling of knowing about ITSM and pushing it further down our list of priorities. Something else was always more important than actually buying the books and arranging the training. Of course, it turned out that we were spending our entire time doing break-fix and working ourselves into the ground in an ever-increasing cycle of work.

The larger we got - consolidating advertising companies onto our Infrastructure - the more stuff broke unexpectedly, and the busier we became. I slept less, ate more, shaved less, checked my Blackberry more and did less productive work.

That period of time ignoring the obvious fact that we needed IT Service Management now reminds me when I used to have a doggy as a teenager. He (Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Timmy -- after the dog in the Famous Five. I lived a very sheltered childhood obviously!)... He would sit at the back door needing to get out into the garden to do his business. You could get away with ignoring him for so long, but eventually you were bound to end up with an unpleasant mess to clear up. Fixing IT services which hardly ever worked didn't smell much better to me.

Actually taking the time to study, and investing in training a cross-section of our engineering and support staff to ITILv3 foundation transformed our operation. We weren't perfect, and started a long cycle of making incremental improvements, and layering on maturity. But we knew, and could measure, that we were on the right track, and we could demonstrate tangible improvements to The Boss.

At this point I decided that investing my energy into ITSM would probably outlast any one particular technology product or area.

Since that point I've seen a few ITSM solutions, both commercial and bespoke, and seen the practice of IT Service Management done really well - and pretty badly.

Anyway - here I am today - I'm very happy to be here at ServiceNow and I hope I can make a difference to people that are in the situation of "ignoring the dog" in their IT departments today.

My work, within the AppDev team, is to make improvements to the core ITSM apps within ServiceNow - Incident, Problem, Change, Service Catalog, Configuration. If you have any comments on how we can improve these apps I'd really love to have that conversation, preferably through the Community website.

You can also follow me on Twitter (@Simo_Morris) or read my seldom updated personal blog at http://blog.beerandspeech.org.

Please get in touch.

Thanks for reading and for using ServiceNow!!

~sm