Internal ServiceNow Center of Excellence and Innovation

[PlatformPadawan]

Hi all,

I'm curious to know what you're all doing if you have a concept of a ServiceNow Center of Excellence within your organization. How is yours structured, what has worked and what needed tweaking? We're looking into doing something like a COEI in our org and we have the roles but curious to know how others are finding success in this area.

Thanks in advance

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @PlatformPadawan 

This might be useful

Assets - Now Create

https://nowlearning.servicenow.com/nowcreate?id=nc_asset&nc_ai_search=true&sys_id=f772ed6f87b5e5d0af...

[Jaskaran Walia]

We have been on this journey for last 4 years, one thing that is consistent is continuous improvement of our Governance framework, Forums, participants, ceremonies etc.

We started in late 2021, and have matured in different aspects such a architecture reviews, delivery and support team engagement, business and product thinking, Executive steering committees etc. Here are my 2 cents on the approach, there is obviously a lot in terms of structure, members, frequency, agenda etc for each of the forums.

1) Start with area that you see big value in having a forum/guild that will help the most. Also, keep in mind the stakeholders that you are looking for users/stakeholders who are open to new ideas/ways of working. For us we started with focus on Architecture review and Product ownership. Once we set up these forums and had them running for 6 months, we gather the feedback from these forums and identified next set of areas for improvement. For us, next areas were Exec Steering and our Run/support team ways of working. So, rinse and repeat this as many times as you need to get to right balance of agility in delivery and governance forums. 
2) As Platform Owner, you must build and gain trust from your business and IT stakeholders. Don't boil the ocean. Once you identify couple of key areas, go hard on showing results and small improvements!
3) Running a Platform Governance model with distributed decision making while ensure principles are adhered to need persistent effort and thought leadership.

Sharing some of the examples of my governance structure as an example for you. Please keep in mind your size and scale of implementation do play a factor in it.

At Fonterra we have everything that ServiceNow offer i.e,. ITSM, ITOM, OT, ITBM, SecOps, IRM, CSM, HR, Employee center pro. So having a working and matured governance is MUST!

[PlatformPadawan]

Jaskaran,

Thank you for sharing, I'm in complete agreement with your 3 main items. We're refining areas within each item currently but overall have an understanding that they are crucial/important.

I am curious though, with an instance that has almost every sku of the SN platform, how large is your team i.e. engineer's and Product owners to support every area, implement new features/functionality, and maintenance of the platform?