Understanding the performance of your business is key to establishing whether your objectives are being realized. Often the starting point for this is the ‘wrong way’ with the available products driving the business requirements and how performance can be measured. This can be facilitated by systems typically having a significant number of reports that focus on the operational Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are process and/or product related e.g. incident closed withing a defined period. This inverts the way of thinking that is required to take a business perspective on needs
“what can I do”
Key to delivering insightful reports to the organization is to focus on “what do I need to get done” rather than “what can I do”. To do this there needs to be a way to link from the business imperatives through ultimately to the product capabilities that will help realise those objectives to the KPIs that will evidence achievement.
The model below is intended to show how that linkage could be achieved. We will step through this model and show how we can execute against it to drive insight into your business. If this model looks more like digital transformation that’s because in some many ways it is. To shift reporting from lagging indicators, that show what has happened in the business (reactive) to leading indicators that provide a forward looking view (proactive) that are going to drive insights in the business then doing this as part of a transformation plan is going to provide the most value.
“what do I need to get done”
Where do you get started? Follow these 5 steps.
Determine your business imperatives
Business Imperative is an initiative that must be accomplished to make meaningful progress toward achieving your strategic vision. Examples of business imperatives include
Automate and optimize technology services operations
Accelerate software transformation
Transform enterprise security
These should be clearly defined and their definition include any specific requirements or expectations. Determining the business imperative sets the ‘true North’ for the activities that follow. These are ‘big rocks’ and typically there would be only 1-2 identified.
It is recommended that a Center of Excellence is in place. This will help optimize the strategic value delivered by the ServiceNow organization by consolidating teams for strategy, business engagement and delivery, platform architect and support, and innovation. This removes the organizational seams that can inhibit your ability to move from vision to value. At minimum the Executive Sponsor, Platform Owner and ServiceNow development lead should be involved in the process of defining the business imperatives.
Define your business requirements that are linked to the business imperatives
Define the business requirements, aka use cases, that are linked to that imperative. There are typically many potential use cases that could be identified therefore it is important to prioritize and rank them based on their impact, feasibility, and urgency. One way of doing this is using Continual Improvement Management. This can be an iterative process based on implementation feasibility, current state of the organization and the recommended implementation sequence that helps identify dependencies. Its therefore important that the platform owner engages with the business stakeholders to understand business requirements and get to a clear prioritization.
Expanding one of the business imperatives shows business requirements that link to the identified imperative.
Automate and optimize technology services operations
Enable end-users to self-solve incidents through L0/digital channels
Reduce repeat incidents through recurrence analysis
It is important that the business requirements are both actionable and ultimately measurable. Realization of the business requirements is through the product capabilities. The transition from business centric to product centric requires understanding the product enablers for your business requirements.
Identify the Product Capabilities required to realise the business requirements
With the business requirements established the next step is to identify what capabilities are required to support the. This would be considered a team activity and should include
- Platform Owner
- Process owners
- ServiceNow Administrator / Developer
- Business Stakeholders
If you have an implementation partner it is recommended that they are part of this exercise.
Use the Recommended Implementation Sequence to understand both where you are at and dependencies
The Recommended Implementation Sequence (RIS) is going to help show the sequencing of the various product capabilities required to realize the business requirements.
The Recommended Implementation Sequence library has a range of sequences showing how products maybe sequenced to provide increasing levels of maturity, from initial foundational implementation, through to high levels of maturity in “fly”. Its important to adapt the RIS to your business context so that the RIS forms the roadmap for your business to realise your requirements over time with ServiceNow and release value.
The expectation is that there is continuous improvement of the previously implemented products as you advance through the sequence.
Measuring the outcomes with KPIs
Measuring these outcomes is critical to understanding your business performance and identifying improvement opportunities. Each KPI can support one or more desired business outcomes
There are 2 types of indicators to be considered
Leading indicator – measurable set of data that helps predict future performance
Lagging indicator – assess the current state of the business
Examples of indicators for “Enable end-users to self-solve incidents through L0/digital channels”
% of Incidents Originating from Phone Call (# of calls deflected in SD)
% self-solved incidents
% of incidents resolved by problem
ServiceNow provides a large range of reports together with multiple reporting methods. Identifying the right report style and content is important.
Reports
Dashboards
Predictive Analytics
Benchmarks
Steps
- Determine the measures for each business requirement
- Rank the measures and determine the key primary and secondary measures for each.
- Document beneficial trends for any of these measures and any key relationships with others
- E.g. increased % of standard changes should reduce change related incidents
- Identify if OOB Reports / Metrics / Dashboards that can be used to represent these measures
- Where there are gaps in the OOB capabilities determine how you would measure them
