ServiceNow - A Fitness Tracker for Your Enterprise

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W. Eric Ledyard, Principal Executive Architect — Inspire Program — March, 2016

You're healthier when you focus on fitness.

Few people would argue with that statement. In fact, one of the best things I have ever done to effect change in my personal lifestyle was to buy and wear a fitness tracker every day. It helped me overcome the biggest hurdle to getting results — because without hard data it's hard to change your behavior.   .

The business world is no different. In order to make impact and "move the needle" on KPIs, you need to measure them so you can understand what needs to change.

Similarly, your business is healthier when you track the fitness of your services.

Doing so will help you reduce costs, be more productive (which can drive top-line revenue), and reduce stress on service providers in the organization (by making the business more predictive and proactive).

When I was talking to my mentor here at ServiceNow about my fitness tracker and how amazing the behavioral shift has been for me, he asked me what made it so effective. The answer I gave was a business answer: "I have visibility into the metrics that matter most to me. I have goals that I have set, and I have the data and tracking to see in real-time how far I am from those goals." It then occurred to us that this was the exact message we wanted to communicate to our customers so they could understand how powerful our platform is, and how we can drive actionable results with our solutions.

My mentor also asked which fitness tracker I had found to be the best and why. My response was: "The best one has nothing to do with the hardware device or the sensors, it has everything to do with the software and user experience that is so effective in driving behavior." Those are the same things I love about ServiceNow software! And they're the reasons why ServiceNow's platform is so effective at helping executives understand the fitness of their business services. I decided to put this blog together to highlight some of these things.

Below is an example from a demo that our practices team put together; it truly leverages the capabilities of the ServiceNow platform to be a fitness tracker for the enterprise to depict the "fitness" of business services, and it's a good trainer, acting on those fitness measures to correct issues.

Critical Outage Mobile Notification

Notification - Data Follows the User

In both cases, the personal fitness tracker and ServiceNow, the systems change behavior by grabbing your attention when there is a critical issue or to provide you an update. Whether your wrist buzzes with notifications or your phone alerts you to a change in status, the ability for your data to find you helps to make you more efficient and eliminates the need to go seek out the data that is important to you. In the example on the left — Ken is an IT Executive who is being alerted to a critical retail service outage. He is provided a mobile application that gives him real-time data that he needs to address the situation.

Critical Outage Landing Page

Simplified Critical Data Visibility

In both applications, the interface is clean and simple — yet provides detailed pertinent data on what is most important to you. In the case of the IT Executive, at a glance he or she can access all of the major bits of information that they need in the time of an issue. What is the outage? What is the business impact? What services are affected? How are we doing in relation to our SLA? What users are impacted and have they been notified? Who is in charge of leading the remediation? What is the timeline of events to bring them up to speed quickly? By providing all of this information in one place, it makes it extremely easy to make data-driven decisions at a glance.

Outage Team Assigned to Remediation

Social Connectivity

Both platforms integrate your data with a social group. In the instance of the IT Executive, they can quickly see who the Outage Lead is and who the support team is who is helping restore services. By utilizing Connect, they can communicate directly with the team and get real-time updates on where things are at any given moment. This level of social connectivity changes the way work is done and is far more efficient than the old-school flurry of e-mails between teams trying to figure out where things are.

Each platform is a combination of sensors and inputs that are all reporting into the same single-source dataset with applications that leverage that data. That is the magic of each.

In the fitness tracker, heart-rate sensors, motion sensors, altimeters, and GPS all work together to provide inputs. In the ServiceNow world, the CMDB, Service Management, Operations Management, Financial Management, Connect, and many other data points come together in a single-source dataset. By creating meaningful correlations between those inputs, you can provide very impactful data that can be used to make well-informed decisions quickly.

So, as you can see, when you combine the power of the right measurement tools with a single-source of data for all aspects of fitness (whether personal or business), you have all the knowledge you need to make data-driven decisions quickly.

Whether those decisions are to get up and go get more steps in, or determining whether you are making the best enterprise outage recovery decisions—that's up to you.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, please reach out to us at inspire@servicenow.com .