As I'm sure you'll agree, every software company worth anything at all will eat it's own dog food. (Actually, in my ServiceNow induction the lovely Karen Chalfont told us "being English we much prefer to drink our own champagne!")
Currently I'm preparing to start a large internal project at ServiceNow - the details of the project aren't that relevant to this post, but it involves a business transformation over a period of a few months, involving technology and process change.
Thinking ahead the technology implementation isn't going to the be the challenging part. It's the co-ordination, training, communication and management of the project that will make or break us!
So - what tools do I have at my disposal?
Live Feed
I'm going to set up a new LiveFeed group to allow anyone in ServiceNow to keep up to date with the project. Rather than spam them with email updates (I want to be very communicative to get issues raised quickly) I can let them decide how they want to consume the data.
They can either check Live feed periodically, or subscribe via email. Also anyone joining the project late can easily get to all of the archive data. Plus updates will be clustered around #hashtags to make the information relevant and easy to locate.
Knowledge/Wiki
There's going to be a lot of documentation for this project - some of it needs to be tightly structured (new policy documents), which I can use the Knowledge functionality for. Means I can attach a workflow to these documents, get them approved and manage them through the lifecycle (revision updates etc).
Other, more general documentation is going to be wiki-fied, allowing others to help me keep everything up to date.
I'm going to deliver rich content using screenshots and videos. I really want colleagues to give me feedback on the documentation and to leave comments, and indicate whether the documentation is helpful or not.
Project Management
I'm going to need to engage other technical resources during the project and keep track of task status, plus manage risks
Training and compliance
Lastly I want to make sure that all of the consumers of the new service we are rolling out have been trained properly. I'm going to use the Survey module to get colleagues to confirm that they've read the documentation, had training and so on.
....all of this within the standard build of ServiceNow... All of this within the licencing agreements with customers (if you wanted to do something similar) and NONE of this has anything to do with ITIL/ITSM!
There are a lot of benefits outside of the IT Management space that ServiceNow can deliver. Eating your own dog food in ServiceNow really isn't a problem at all.
Wish me luck on my project!
Photo Credit: christianhaugen on Flickr
