Platform Governance Framework - Customer Lense

[Jaskaran Walia]

Hi All,

I thought I will share our journey of implementing Platform Governance as Platform owner at Fonterra.

Background:

My name is Jaskaran Walia. I have been fortunate to pursue my passion for technology over last 20 year where I have enjoyed working with large corporate organizations spanning the Banking, Insurance, Investment, Air line and Dairy industry.

In particular, the last 13 years or so, I have worked in ServiceNow ecosystem across India, Ireland and New Zealand. Over these years, I have performed multiple roles starting as admin, developer, senior consultant, architect and most recently, as a Platform Owner who is responsible for driving ServiceNow platform strategy, roadmap, architecture review and design, governance framework, standing up support and delivery teams.

Customer:

For last 3 years, I have working as Platform Owner at Fonterra. Fonterra is New Zealand’s largest company and one of the world’s leading dairy exporters with operations spanning across Asia-Pacific, Japan, Americas and Europe.

Fonterra is a marquee customer of ServiceNow with implementation spanning across ITSM, ITOM, ITAM, ITBM, SecOps, HR, CSM, OT and IRM.

Fonterra have been customer of ServiceNow for last 9-10 years! Even with the best ServiceNow implementation partner and product on the platform, we lacked ownership and governance in house, resulting in highly customized instance that we couldn’t patch, leave aside upgrade. Hence, In 2020, Fonterra decided to do the green field re-implementation of our instance! It was a costly lesson learned but our CIO/CTO made it absolutely clear to retain the strategic decision making role i.e. Platform Owner in house and the sole owner of the platform.

Our Journey

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! Add Product owners/ key business stakeholder who are responsible for driving new feature and improvements in align to business roadmaps.

I am happy to share more information if it helps anyone in either starting or maturing their COE/Platform governance journey. I have requested a blog access so posting this info as question!

Thanks,

Jaskaran Walia

Platform Owner - ServiceNow

[PrabhakarCh]

Thank you @Jaskaran Walia for the detailed information on Governance. I am the Platform Owner for ServiceNow internal implementations for a large IT Service Organization in India. Apr'24 is when I took over this role and had to bat around like a T-20 Batsman for last 8 months. We achieved good success rate starting with upgrading the platform to WDC. We are also the marquee customer for ServiceNow. As you rightly mentioned, having a diligent Governance is extremely critical in making the platform sustainable and scalable in the long run. I implemented the Demand to CAB process flow where all the Demands go through DRB and ADRB and CAB approvals to ensure the customization is minimized and business understands the importance of OOTB opportunity. 

Since last year, we did many implementations, this year my priority is to first Adoption and Value realization, then making ServiceNow platform robust (moving back to box) and process adherence. 

Would love to connect and discuss further. Prabhakar Cherukuri (PC) | LinkedIn

Best,

Prabhakar (PC) 

[Ben Pierce]

Thanks for sharing!  Sounds like you're doing a great job!  So true that it requires constant attention and discipline!