GE Power's largest deal leveraged ServiceNow

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In November 2015, GE Power announced that it completed a $13 billion acquisition of Alstom's power and grid businesses.   This was GE's largest ever industrial acquisition.   Wall Street hailed this deal saying Alstom's power division fit well with GE's business.   While the markets cheered the deal, we had our task cut out for us. Alstom was a French based company using Remedy and were very entrenched in that solution.   We needed to show them that ServiceNow was easy to use, could handle their unique situations even with a consolidated process and not disrupt their business.

I'm going to share at Knowledge, this story about how GE Power made this huge integration into our ServiceNow solution possible. A lot of us have done integrations or transitioned teams into our ServiceNow platform. This session will be great for anyone who is responsible for making the decisions to integrate or transition into ServiceNow or for leaders who need to discuss processes changes for new teams.   In particular, Directors, Process Leaders, Program leaders will find it useful.   And I'd love to have anyone else that's interested.

So, how did ServiceNow compare to other projects I've been involved in?   As the Director of IT Service Management, I align with the business' vision for IT services and strive to deliver the best service experience through all stages of the service. Once we were able to influence our leaders that our vision for the transition into ServiceNow was the best course of action, we were able to drive a consistent message across the organization and gain buy-in on why we needed to move quickly. This project was one of the fastest integrations we have done because of our commitment to a standard across GE Power. It is noteworthy that when the deal with Alstom was complete, we needed to provide support for them within one year.   With the help of ServiceNow we were able to accomplish this in 6 months.  

If I was asked to pick out the single biggest positive change in our environment, I would say it was the consolidation of all processes and tools on ServiceNow's single system of action. We now have a single process for GE Power for all our employees and support teams. Prior to the integration, we had several processes and tools.

We see a very successful future with ServiceNow.   We are looking to handle more automation, self-service, and data analytics out of ServiceNow. We are also driving toward a standard process across General Electric in each of the processes.

Takeaways from this session:

I hope there'll be some useful takeaways for you from this session.   There are many ways to integrate teams into ServiceNow. You will see from this session how we made engagement across the integrated teams a critical part of our project.   It helps change the culture and the processes. You will also see how our best practices helped us accomplish our largest integration ever.

A word on Knowledge:

I have been to Knowledge many times.   I enjoy hearing what other large customers are doing within the platform. I also enjoy hearing the direction ServiceNow is taking with the platform. For those who are first timers, my recommendation would be to attend as many sessions as you can and ask questions. Make the sessions interactive, if you can. Also, talk to your peers from other businesses to see what is working and what is not working.