What's the competitive advantage your enterprise can nurture that's most difficult to commoditize away? Service. It's the service you deliver to your colleagues, customers and partners that allow you to carve out unique and defensible places in their hearts and budgets. This fact as much as anything is a defining element of The New Age of Service.
What makes it possible to deliver the best possible service most consistently to your constituents? Processes that work. Process is how anyone or anything, including great cloud-based software, gets anything meaningful done. And almost any task or goal can be broken down into individual tasks, each of which performed by one or a few processes.
Want to be funny? Did you know there's a popular and widely used process for doing so professionally? Me, neither, but I'm not surprised.)
Is Scott Adams smarter than almost every content decision maker in Hollywood across the past two decades? Maybe, but that's not the important answer. The important answer is "not necessarily — but his process is."
As he's said publicly, perhaps only partly in jest, Scott Adams' process is basically to open and read his mail. He gets so many suggestions from readers for comic strips, he barely has to come up with original ideas anymore.
You can probably cite numerous examples from your own professional life of the critical roles processes play in your enterprise's operations. But those roles can heroic, comic, inconsequential or tragic. The trick is to get selection and implementation of key processes right, then to automate, replicate and scale them wherever in the enterprise they can deliver business value.
How important is getting process right? Well, would hackers be able to break into supposedly secure systems at companies such as Target via poorly protected connections to external systems if processes regularly vetted and better protected (or forbade) those connections?
Here's my take on what's needed to get those processes right.
Leadership with collective will focused on building and running a service-centric enterprise and inculcating a service-centric culture across the whole of that enterprise. Current reality will almost always lag behind the current version of leadership's ultimate vision. So that leadership must also understand that sustainable future success relies on striving for continuous movement toward realization of that vision. Which is a process-intensive set of activities. Which is why the next thing you need is…
Processes that work, within and beyond IT. This is simple to say but challenging to do. It means that every critical task must be evaluated and analyzed regularly, to ensure that every process supporting every such task is the best that it can be. Due diligence is a critical success factor when developing, evaluating, implementing or automating any critical processes. Getting all of the stakeholders, within and beyond IT, to cleave unto and adhere to this focus, could be one of the biggest sustained challenges facing the leadership team. And in parallel, that leadership must convince those stakeholders, within and beyond IT, to commit to deploying and managing…
Infrastructure that enables consistently straightforward creation, deployment, delivery and management of the processes and services that make the service-centric enterprise possible. That infrastructure must also support the inevitable changes and evolutions needed for the enterprise to achieve continuous improvement of its key processes and services.
Throughout your journey to all of the above, it's critical to remember the importance of culture and clear communication. Transformational changes in processes and how they are created, deployed, delivered and managed often means significant changes in incumbent, familiar and comfortable roles. Plan and communicate accordingly. Be consistently transparent.
As I've written here recently, several elements are critical to your success in the transformation of IT and your enterprise. These include social collaboration, storytelling, discovery, automation, and IT transformation itself. There are others, some of which I'll discuss in future outings here. But among them all, process is arguably the most critical.
You owe it to your enterprise, your IT team, your customers, partners and prospects and to your career to get process right and to do what it takes to keep getting it right. Which means you need to come to Knowledge14, get close to a ServiceNow User Group (SNUG). Check out the Best Practice Process Workshops available from ServiceNow Professional Services. Engage with a ServiceNow partner with expertise in your enterprise's specific business and key processes. And share what you learn, and learn more, right here at the ServiceNow Community. You and your enterprise's processes will both benefit.
