Today I went to the ServiceNow UK User Group hosted by Harrods and Focus Group Europe.
It was my first outing to a user group and it was a really great opportunity to meet customers and make new contacts.
The agenda for the day was:
Introductions and General discussion
The UK User Group is led by Lewis Martin from 2e2 who lead the group through an introductory round-the-room standup.
We had around 40 people in the Harrods training room. I was impressed both by the number and the breadth of industry sectors that were represented in the group. Today we had customers from charities, ISPs, energy companies, hospitals, logistic, banks, utility providers and two universities. Along with the community of ServiceNow partners.
Company update
Our UK Sales Director, Kevin Kimber gave the group an update on ServiceNow as a company - our growth, where the UK fits into the larger organisation, the challenges of hyper-growth and where we see ourselves against our peers in the ITSM industry and in the future.
Highlights of his talk were:
- Outside of the US ServiceNow has offices in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Tel Aviv and Australia
- As a company we are focussed on process improvement and quality in our product
- Our Gen2 data-centers offer huge benefits to customers in terms of RPO and RTO
- Our biggest customer by volume handles 40,000 incidents per day!
Aspen and Gen 2 architecture
After a coffee break and a chance to meet more members of the group Kevin and Cushla O'Leary, a Customer Success Manager, took us through the migration steps to take customers up to the Aspen release and into the Gen2 datacenters.
Harrods - Customer presentation
Nikki Taylor-Green, Harrods change and support services manager, presented on how they selected ServiceNow during their RFI process.
The talk started with some interesting facts about Harrods as an organisation and a brand. It's actually a huge operation involving retail staff in the flagship location as well as airport shops, home shopping and other supporting services. Harrods has two helicopters and offers financial services.
I also learnt that Harrods had the first moving escalator in the United Kingdom, the first safety deposit box and the first air-conditioning.
Back to technology and Nikki talked about the rapid selection to deployment to go-live that Harrods went through.
It sounds like a great success story both for Harrods and for ServiceNow. One thing I went away with today is that our success as a Services organisation is permanently and irrevocably linked to our customers success. We can't be successful if you aren't and visa-versa.
You can read about the Harrods experience with ServiceNow here.
FocusGE - Service Level Management, SLAs and Reporting
FocusGE finished off the day with a quick presentation / open discussion forum around reporting and Service Level Management.
One of our customers had a great idea that I'd like to see implemented within our own internal procedures. I asked the group how many customers are using SLAs outside of the Incident and Request Fulfilment process. One of our customers is using SLAs on Problem Management to drive the performance of finding the root cause of an issue and publishing a Known Error and Workaround.
It makes sense that Problem Management is a hard process to timebox. The root cause of a Problem might be very hard or expensive to remove from the system, or may involve development or major project work to remove.
And although Problem removal is a stage that we'd like to get to as quickly as possible we should also remember that the customer extracts value from the process a lot earlier in the Problem lifecycle by benefiting from the Known Error and Workaround.
These two pieces of information aid Incident association to the correct Problem, avoid duplication of Problem records and increase the speed and quality of Incident resolution. It makes total sense that we should measure this aspect of Problem Management and strive to improve performance.
SLAs make total sense, I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner!
Of course the user group is also a chance for customers to raise concerns and issues. It wouldn't be fair to write up the positive aspects without a mention for the negative points.
Customer feedback from the session was:
- Customer Support is getting better and more responsive, we need to concentrate on our communication
- Customers would like more visibility of Problems and when they'll be fixed
- We would like to be able to script the start and stop conditions of SLAs
- SLAs are confusing when we mix the duration of time in the SLA with Actual time and Business time
- Reporting needs some love generally and specifically with itil users being able to share and publish reports on a one-to-one basis
... and a few other questions about Client Scripts in the Service Catalog and clicking web-links in emails when using SSO.
I log these points above to demonstrate that we do listen and I'll be creating enhancements and writing emails for all of the above tomorrow. We only improve as a result of feedback.
Anyway, great session and thanks very much to Lewis, Harrods and FocusGE for organising, hosting and sponsoring the event. Was a great day!
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