ITOM outcomes and how to measure them

[Matt Gowarty]

ServiceNow® IT Operations Management

Define and measure success by identifying clear business outcomes and key performance indicators.

Introduction

Every organization strives to increase revenue, reduce risk, minimize cost, and provide exceptional customer and employee service. When it comes to IT operations, most organizations have 10s to 100s of different tools and staff that discover, alert, and manage the IT infrastructure. The biggest challenge, ironically, it's not the lack of data, it’s often having too much data spread across siloed tools and teams which includes increased noise, more inconsistent and duplicate data, and a lack of prioritization based on business importance. ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) can help organizations with these challenges to be more successful and profitable.

While each organization has their own unique environment, challenges, and goals, we found that most organizations achieve common results when leveraging ITOM across their organization. This document will highlight some of our key findings in working with thousands of ITOM and ITSM customers. Some of the metrics will provide results from individual customers as well as aggregate of common key performance indicators (KPI) we pulled from researching our customers.

Key ITOM business outcomes

The table below summarizes the most frequent ITOM business outcomes along with specific objectives that support these outcomes. Think about how each of these outcomes supports your organization’s business goals and create a ranked list. Choose the top outcomes and share these with your stakeholders to get alignment on priorities. Then, evaluate how many of these agreed outcomes you can reasonably address in your initial ITOM rollout, and which ones need to be delivered in future phases. Note that you can achieve all of the business outcomes below over time. However, by prioritizing which ones to target first, you accelerate time to value and avoid casting your net too wide.

ITOM Business Outcomes	ITOM Business Objectives
Reduce Business Disruptions from Outages (Duration)	Improve Mean Time to Repair/Resolve (MTRR) Reduce Time to close ticket Reduce volume of business disruptions Minimize outages caused by TLS certificate expiration Faster resolutions with detailed service mapping
Reduce Business Disruptions from Outages (Time to Identify)	Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) Percent time anomalies detected before end-user impact Event Noise Reduction Minimize outages caused by TLS certificate expiration Limit risk of firewall policy conflicts causing an outage
Reduce Incident Resolution Effort (IT Operator and Fulfiller Productivity)	Reduce manual steps for sharing information Reduce incidents caused by change Improve resolutions with automated remediation Faster consolidation of multiple tools into CMDB
Reduce Incident Volume Worked (IT Operator and Fulfiller)	Reduce number of incidents caused by false alerts Reduce number of incidents caused by duplicate alerts
Reduce Costs	Single system of record for hybrid deployment Less manual effort by leveraging certified connectors Tool consolidation Lower license cost with Oracle GLAS certified auditing
Automate cloud operations	Reduce incident volume worked (cloud) [# incidents -cloud related] Reduce incident resolution effort (cloud) [Avg. resolution effort - cloud related] Increase change automation [% standard changes] Increase request automation (provisioning) [% of provisioning requests that are automated] Increase cloud operations management efficiency

Examples of customer results

Here are some examples of results peer organizations have achieved using ServiceNow ITOM, ITSM, and Service Operations. Please note these results are not guaranteed, but intended as a real-life example of what other organizations have achieved. You can leverage these guidelines and examples to help build a business case for your organization.

Company	Results
de Volksbank	30+ teams use notifications based on Event Management 5 people reduced for 24/7 support and reallocated 1 hour deployment vs. historical average of 3 days
Mindsprint	95% of incidents are automatically remediated 57% reduction in time to close a P0/P1 incident 99% of tickets land in the right queue the first time
Mindtree	50% reduction in IT operations costs 80% improvement in time to complete routine tasks 30% improvement in incident management resolution time
Munich Re	99% of CMDB assets discovered automatically 30% more SQL databases discovered 9 months to deliver 15-month project