ServiceNow demonstrates leadership beyond ITSM in the Forrester SPM Wave

[rickyb]

There's already a lot of buzz about the recently published Forrester Wave identifying ServiceNow as a leader in the Strategic Portfolio Management space but I wanted to share my insights - as a team member that worked on getting Forrester the data they needed to do their analysis, as well as a from the perspective of being a ServiceNow employee and experiencing the buzz internally.

For too long ServiceNow had been misunderstood as an ITSM vendor that offered "other products",   which proved to be untrue when you looked at the history of ServiceNow (see: Get Your History Lesson Here - ServiceNow is NOT an ITSM Company Selling ITBM).   As it was in the beginning, it still is today; the ServiceNow platform is a terrific way to build applications that can share information in ways that can deliver benefits no single collection of point solutions can provide. A fitting example of this is the IT Business Management (ITBM) product which has the applications that Forrester analyzed resulting in our leadership position in the Strategic Portfolio Management Wave. The ITBM suite of applications includes Demand Management, Resource Management, Project Portfolio Management, Agile Development, and Test Management as well as Application Portfolio Management and IT Financial Management. It is truly an end to end solution centralizing the management of all the elements needed to align demand, resources, projects, applications and financials with the strategic direction of the enterprise. The ITBM product is the first ServiceNow product outside of ITSM to be named a leader by a major analyst firm, and I'm pretty sure it won't be the last!

Participating on the project: It took a great team of dedicated folks to review the myriad of information requests from Forrester, interpret their analytical intent, then respond according all the while needing to cite actual functionality in the ITBM product that could substantiate our claims. That, in and of itself, was a very challenging undertaking. Multiple conference calls were necessary to really get to the heart of the Forrester questions, particularly where the question was somewhat open to interpretation — and we had no shortage of interpretations.   But, all in all, the end result included the fact that the ITBM solution could indeed deliver on what was being required to support our answers and explanations. Another piece of the response that we didn't have a whole lot of control over was the customer reference responses. We identified customers willing to talk to Forrester but had no real clue what was going to be asked or how our customers would answer. It wasn't until we saw the preview draft of the analysis that we could breathe a sigh of relief, AND smile about what our customers were saying about us. ServiceNow is a VERY customer-centric company and that came across in our customer's responses to Forrester's questions. All in all, the final product speaks for itself, you can find the Forrester Strategic Portfolio Management Wave report here (Forrester SPM Wave).

Internal Buzz: It's always fun to have the fruits of your labor taste so sweet. We were on pins and needles after submitting all of our input to Forrester, just couldn't wait to see the results. Obviously when we were provided a preview of the results we were ecstatic. The original preview only showed our position — right up in the top right well inside the leadership wave line. Our joy was met with a little hesitation since we didn't know who else was in there with us and how they were juxtaposed.   So, we waited…   At last the full report was released to us and we were thrilled with the results. ServiceNow's executive leadership, the BU, and on down was abuzz with delight and the ITBM business unit had its chest out knowing this was a first for any BU outside the ITSM folks.   We're blowing our horn everywhere but have no intention on resting on our laurels. The analysis was based on the Jakarta release of our platform and we're in the race to get Kingston out pretty soon. Between that next release and what's coming after it, 2018 is looking really good, and I'm darn proud to be part of the ITBM Business Unit.