If you're thinking of building a CMS Portal in your ServiceNow instance there are a lot of really great resources available that discuss ServiceNow CMS at a high level, some best practices, and how to get started. You can find great tips including things like:
- How to leverage internal design resources and corporate design standards
- Importance of employing a responsive design
- Prototyping and rapid web design
Having worked with many customers to roll out a CMS site, whether it be an IT Self-Service Portal, HR Portal, or just branding a survey, there are a couple of non-technical practices that are typically overlooked at first, but can add a lot of value to your CMS implementation.
- Overlooking the user experience of your content - You may have designed and built this beautiful, responsive CMS site, but haven't spent any time on the user experience of your catalog items. If a catalog item doesn't have a description or picture, but has 100 questions and is difficult to fill out, all your user will get is a poor looking catalog item with a pretty CMS wrapper around it that is difficult to fill out.
Use your CMS rollout as an opportunity to revisit your catalog items and record producer forms. Do some surveying and determine if any of your forms are giving folks trouble. If so, spend some time auditing those items and make sure you absolutely need to ask each question. Make sure you are pre-populating values wherever possible. One of the big reasons companies tend to use CMS is the ability to organize content to make it easier to find and more user friendly, and that should extend all the way through the user experience from the landing page through ordering an item. - Overlooking the people who will be using your CMS site - This may seem obvious to most, but I've seen multiple projects where one or two people drive the entire CMS implementation from the design phase all the way through UAT. It's always good practice to include stakeholders at the beginning of a project and with this project, that means the ESS users in your organization that request the most items and open the most incidents. If you have an existing implementation, identifying these users is very easy to get at with a couple of reports. By inviting the heavy users to take part at the very beginning of the project, you'll end up with a CMS site that really fits the needs of your customers. Also, when people are involved in something like this from the beginning, they typically feel more ownership in the finished product. You will get the benefit of having a group of champions outside of IT throughout your company.
A successful CMS implementation is more than a sleek, branded landing page, so don't forget to think about usability and your customers as you plan your CMS site. Join me for my experts session in October where I share more CMS good practices and tips as well as answering your CMS related questions.
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Brad Tilton will be hosting Ask The Expert: Live Chat | CMS Implementation - Best Practices on October 28th. Watch Live and Ask Brad directly your questions regarding CMS Implementations.
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