In six weeks the biggest ServiceNow event Knowledge17 will take place again and more than 13.000 participants around the globe will come to Orlando to share their experience with each other and to get inspired from the competence across borders and continents.
I can almost talk about a tradition that Siemens is at the stage of this great event again. This time I'm glad to being chosen to speak to the Knowledge audience. Our company — one of the biggest in Germany with 350.000 employees worldwide — is presenting our achievements since 2015 every year. This year it is a big pleasure for me to being nominated as a presenter with my topic around the CMDB and master data. I will be delivering the break out session at the K17 and this blog is a sneak preview for my slide deck. I'm happy to share my Best Practices, challenges and experience gained with ServiceNow ITSM tool to build up a global CMDB in the IT infrastructure environment. My breakout session titled "Driving Digitization and Gaining Full Transparency in a Multi-Provider Environment by a Smart CMDB".
I chose this topic because the CMDB is core to all ITSM processes in our organization which is today represented in more than 190 countries all over the world. And this CMDB is a data turntable for our fully automated Self-Service Portal based on ServiceNow. We call it myIT portal!
Siemens myIT Portal with a back-end environment has the unique in matter of establishing standard interfaces in dealing with 11 different external Managed Service Providers. Not only will I share the organization's achievements, but I'll also tell you about the issues we faced, the lessons learned, and the best practices used during our Service Integration program.
This session should be interesting to decision makers in companies that are struggling to decide whether ServiceNow is the right ITSM tool and whether or not the investment in ServiceNow will generate savings and benefits for the organization. But this is also valuable for IT Service Managers, Data Analysts and IT infrastructure Managers in enterprise and mid-size environments. I also imagine CXOs can be positively influenced at this session, seeing how much progress can be achieved with the right team equipped with the right concept and a smart (=achievable) roadmap.
How we chose ServiceNow
Our journey began in 2013 with a very intensive and well-prepared PoC (proof of concept). Top ITSM tool leaders have been first selected and secondly invited to present their solutions and to deliver evidences for being able to cover Siemens demands in IT Infrastructure environment. I was leading this due diligence and PoC phase, where my experience from the previous role as the global Operational Framework SME lead (subject matter experts) was very helpful. Enterprise ITSM software products from market leaders and innovative young ITSM newcomer were invited to Siemens IT Headquarter to Munich to present their solutions in a joint workshop.
From four leading ITSM tool vendors,
- BMC with SolveDirect (currently Cisco),
- ServiceNow and
- HEAT FrontRange
two companies have been selected and get an offer to participate in a PoC and to implement predefined use-case scenarios. Our due diligence with a PoC lasted a year - which is very long — but the umbrella contract afterwards was signed for the entire company with 350K employees worldwide. The ServiceNow pre-sales specialists Peter Andermann and Georg Maureder have delivered a good job.
Siemens IT is a company's Corporate Unit follows rigorous standards and clear rules. After the contract sign-off a number of penetration tests have been completed by Siemens and the outcomes were worked out in close cooperation between ServiceNow and Siemens InfoSec specialists. Also onsite pentests have took place.
Complex scenarios and service request transactions were built, key stakeholders from Siemens corporate IT (CIT) were involved, questionnaires were answered and the end-user community was deeply involved too. We then did a lot of research before we visited ServiceNow and other potential candidates in Silicon Valley for negotiations before the decision was made in favor ServiceNow. We made the right decision.
Once the umbrella-contract was signed, we implemented the first set of services within 6 months and got a grip on the 12-month roadmap for other services.
Biggest change in the environment
One of the biggest positive achievements was to set a standard for interfaces. One standard was set for all Managed Service Providers to get a full transparency on Services and Costs at the user level per dedicated service. Due to Siemens history, the data ownership and the data hosting was with Service Providers, such as Atos, Vodafone, AT&T and many others. Now we were able to consolidate the data and to structure our CMDB to be able to hold 8 million of CIs and 6 million of CI relations in one environment.
We achieved all this with a smart team of only 3 FTE in the master data team. Of course this was only possible because of close cooperation and collaboration across all teams, such as Interfaces, Service Catalog, INC & Change Management and Commercials.
Vision for future
Our journey with ServiceNow has only started. In the future, much more to come:
- Higher transparency
- clear and visualized CMDB dashboard
- extended and semi-automated Data Quality Checks. This is the current process for DQ Checks we are running on a regular base (image below)
- expanding from IT Infrastructure services to IT applications
- usage of Service Cataloges not only for Siemens employees but also for external customers with different product portfolio etc.
Thanks to the well-structured Framework for Integrated IT Services — called FITS — we do have the flexibility to exchange our Service Providers on a Service Level having established easy plug-in/plug-out interfaces.
Our CMDB will continue to expand leveraging the power of ServiceNow's single system of record. That will give us more opportunities for data mining, better predictive analytics and should clearly increase cost savings. I will be glad to welcome you to my presentation at the Knowledge17.
