When I was a callow youth living in MIT's Baker House, I was a big fan of wall posters. One of my favorites was one that looked differently from this one, but carried the exact same message.
Another favorite, so old that I can find no online image of it, asked "How can you fly a starship if you can't clean your room?" A worthy question, indeed.
Both of these images have been recurring in my mind's eye recently, as I've been thinking a lot about enterprise IT, innovation and transformation. Here's why.
In this New Age of Service, when every business service relies upon IT, IT must be transformed into an excellent provider and manager of services. IT must then extend that transformation to other shared services groups across the enterprise. But here's the misery-inducing (or -increasing) truth. Legacy solutions and processes are simply unable to provide the flexible, agile, powerful, easy-to-use "service fabric" the modern, service-centric enterprise requires.
Meanwhile, too many IT teams are still mired in a morass of outdated, reactive, break-fix-focused tasks, processes and tools. Or to paraphrase that second poster, how can IT innovate or transform itself if it can't clean up its incident or trouble ticket backlog?
Fortunately, there is a way out. And it's being demonstrated and documented by ServiceNow customers, as they use the power and flexibility of ServiceNow to begin and accelerate innovation and transformation, within and beyond IT. How? By using ServiceNow to:
- Consolidate, standardize and globalize IT services, systems and processes onto a single system of record.
- Deliver a consumerized service experience to customers, internal users and external business partners.
- Implement "lights out," "zero-touch" automation to replace manual, redundant activities.
- Extend successful solutions first proven in IT to manage service relationships effectively throughout and even outside of the enterprise.
Each of the first three of these steps makes IT less reactive and more agile, efficient and forward-looking. Which in turn improves the quality and availability of all the services enabled by IT. And each creates opportunities for innovation and transformation within IT. But it's that fourth one that marks the beginning of IT-led, IT-enabled, enterprise-wide transformation via modern custom applications and true service relationship management.
If you (or your colleagues, or your boss) want to see ample, credible evidence of the above, check out the finalists from ServiceNow's 2013 Innovation of the Year competition. Then watch the winners from Target discuss and display their winning custom application in this on-demand Webinar. (Free; minimal registration required.) To see much more such evidence, in real life and real time, you and they must come to Knowledge14 in San Francisco. And if you and your team are already on the path towards innovative transformation, within or beyond IT, get your application for this year's Innovation of the Year competition in by March 31.
Once IT begins to innovate with ServiceNow, transformation is within reach, for IT and beyond. Transform IT. Transform the enterprise.
