The annual global ServiceNow customer event, Knowledge14, is fast approaching but it's not too late to register for something now so large that I consider it an industry event. And that's an industry event where over 90% of breakout session presentations will be delivered by customers — successful customers who want others to share not only what they have achieved bit also how they achieved it.
After all, if you tell people what they need to/must do (and usually using flowery words) but nothing about how to do it, does it really help? I think not.
As I've previously written, customer success is a dish of a many ingredients. At Knowledge14, we will see that:
- Capabilities to improve governance are in vogue — ITAM and GRC in particular — with an emphasis on financial stewardship too.
- Customers are getting tool and process implementation right. After all, having a great strategy means little if you fail in execution.
- Consumerization is driving service catalog initiatives but it is also raising employee expectations of service delivery. Whether it be the service experience from IT, HR, legal, facilities, or any other corporate service provider. And savvy CIOs are helping these other business functions to up their service delivery game through IT.
But, as with baking a cake, knowing which ingredients to use is just the starting point. The baker also needs to know where best to get these ingredients, how much of each to use, how to mix them, and how long to cook the mix for. A successful baker also benefits from personal experience, third-party hints and tips (or recipes), and potentially from the assistance of others.
Implementation woes? Yup, a great strategy means little if you fail in execution
To continue with the high level of customer involvement, some Knowledge14 breakout sessions include multiple customers. Take the three customer implementation success panels I'm moderating for instance — each involves three successful customers. So that's nine customers, in these three sessions alone, wanting to share what they've learnt in implementing ServiceNow.
Implementation is such a key area, I think most of us know that just systematically swapping one technology solution for another doesn't necessarily guarantee any form of improvement let alone tangible success such as improved efficiency, reduced costs, or better service and service experience. After all, delivering new service management technology, new or improved processes, and the associated people change isn't easy. Especially where that change might go beyond IT and IT service management (ITSM) to improve enterprise-wide service delivery, e.g. HR or facilities, and maybe to cater for multi-supplier sourcing environments.
And that change or transformation isn't in a vacuum. There's no doubt in my mind that the management of IT and service delivery continues to get more complex, not only from an inherent technology perspective but also from an operational point of view. So why not learn from the successes of others?
But customers can also look beyond other enterprise IT organizations for guidance, especially with managed service providers (MSPs) that live or die based on their quality of service, the speed and ease of change, and factors related to cost and value.
So why not learn from MSP experiences?
While most ServiceNow customers, and thus Knowledge14 attendees, are enterprise customers there is also value to be had from looking at the MSP implementation experience. As you can imagine, delivering transformational change in a multi-customer-facing MSP environment can be even more difficult than its enterprise equivalent. With a greater focus on customer satisfaction, uptime, quality of service, and costs, implementing transformational change as an MSP offers up its own set of challenges and good practices that are relevant to IT organizations of all sizes.
We often hear phrases such as "run IT as a business" or, my preference, "run IT like a business" so why not look at what can be learned from MSP operations and transformational change activities? MSPs are the proverbial "IT run as a business" and thus potentially a great source of good practice to tap into. Whether it be implementation or day-to-day operations.
And while there is not an "app for that" (yet), there is a breakout session based on MSP customer implementation successes with ServiceNow customers CareWorks Tech, Linium, and Teradata. It will cover a lot of ground including:
- How their MSP requirements differed from enterprise implementations
- Key implementation lessons learned and practical advice
- Potential perils and pitfalls to avoid
- How to deliver both IT and operational transformation.
But all three customer implementation success panels should be informative and hopefully fun — in many ways this is the Knowledge14 mantra.
There will be so much to learn from the circa 200 breakout sessions plus the keynotes and lab sessions, and you will struggle not to have fun with other attendees. It's a great event and feel free to retort "but you would say that."
So I hope to see you at Knowledge14. And if you really can't make it, whilst it's a poor substitute to actually being there, I'll create a blog that covers the key learnings from these three implementation-based customer success panels.
