A Practical Example on Getting Proactive

[Heath Ramsey]

I sat through a presentation today by Jay Anderson, ServiceNow CIO.   He was presenting the Now on Now story, which discussed how we at ServiceNow are utilizing our own platform internally.   One of his stories struck me as very coincidental to our discussion on analytics and getting proactive.

You might think that the process I described in my previous blog post takes a long time.   The whole idea of starting with process structure might lead you to think you need to build a whole workflow from beginning to end before rolling it out.   Building a process structure could take days, weeks, or months depending on the organization and how many people need to be involved for approval, etc.

Jay had a much more simple thought about this.   Just collect the data and understand the types of requests and work that need to be done.   That alone will guide you on what you need to work on.   His example came directly from ServiceNow as we were rolling out our own Facilities Management process for ServiceNow internal employees.   Rather than attempt to create process workflows for every type of facility request, Jay's organization created a form that would allow request intake.   People that had an issue would just submit a form with the request.   The request would then be reviewed and acted upon.

The #3 facility request at ServiceNow?   Gym access.   Yes, it turns out we are a very healthy bunch that wanted access to the campus gym but did not know how to get it.   Based on this information, Jay's team built a very simple automated workflow to provision gym access with one click by the user.   Just like that, the team was able to eliminate one of the top 3 facility request backlogs.

And it follows our general approach:

1.   Process Structure—in this case, process structure was simply a request form for someone to get help with an issue.

2.   Create Visibility—the number and types of requests were presented through reports.   Insight was immediately achieved just by seeing the number of requests broken down by type.

3.   Get Proactive—a trend was not even needed to be proactive here.   A process workflow was created that the team knew would automate and solve the problem.

You are not going to be able to achieve "analytics nirvana" as easily as in this case.   However, don't be intimidated by the process.   In many cases, just collecting the requests in a structured form can help you make sense of what you need to work on first by creating the necessary visibility right in the ServiceNow platform.   Your goal of getting proactive may be much closer than you think!