Platform Owner Wishlist

[johnnyb]

Good afternoon, fellow Platform Owners!

I've been asked the classic question: "If you could have anything to ensure your success, what would it be?" I know this is an "it depends" scenario, but surely many of you have encountered this question or given it some thought. I'd love to hear your wish lists or lessons learned. Hopefully, this will benefit both current and future platform owners, helping us build our community.

Here's some context for our situation:

• Current Resources: 1 full-time Platform Owner (technical background, with two years of ServiceNow experience).

• Additional Resources: Managed Service Provider (MSP) offering 40 hours/week, including Project Management, Architecture, Development, Business Analysis, and additional support as needed.

• Platform History: Implemented around 2012 with an original ITSA Unlimited SKU; recently upgraded licensing to include CSM Pro Plus (approximately 90% of incidents originate via email from public websites), SAM Pro, ITOM Discovery, and SPM Standard, among other capabilities.

• Initiatives: Considering a "back-to-box" approach, potentially involving a fresh implementation due to a decade of DIY customizations.

• CMDB Data: Currently "immature" with about 1,000 Configuration Items.

• Organization Size: Approximately 700 staff directly supported via the platform, plus thousands of external users indirectly supported through our staff.

We're approaching significant growth in our platform usage and have numerous implementation-like efforts ahead.

So, what's on your wish list? Is it training, personnel, specific tools, or something else entirely?

Looking forward to the insights and discussions this sparks!

Thanks!

[Vishal Jaswal]

Hello @johnnyb

1. Automation - X Number of automations achieved each quarter for all modules.

2. Customisation limit - Put a % limit for each licensed module that no beyond than this % of customisations to be allowed.

3. Rely on instance scan and best practices: Remove any hard coded values specified anywhere, remove unwanted custom fields or custom solutions.

4. Purge old data - If possible, try to keep the storage limit to what have been licensed for.

5. Tools Consolidation: If an organisation have multiple legacy ticketing tools then an effective project plan with implementation to retire them and use one single pane of glass for ITSM which is ServiceNow.

6. Data Warehouse/ Data lake taking export snapshot of ServiceNow tables for reporting instead of ServiceNow directly.

7. Enterprise/Governance entity which keeps track of every ServiceNow development, deployment, processes, licensing, protocols, approvals for onboarding users/developers etc. into ServiceNow.

[PlatformPadawan]

Hi @johnnyb,

We operate on a quarterly roadmap decided upon by the office of the CTO amongst multiple other factors that come into play for what is next for projects/implementations for our team. I reference this because our wishlist has to align with this process in order to materialize.

In the near future we plan to upgrade to HRSD Pro and implement NowAssist for ITSM (and HRSD depending on pricing). After that I'd like to mature into CSDM/CMDB and SPM but that may be within the next 3-5 years 

We're also starting a Center of Excellence within the org to help drive governance, innovation, and best practices. All this to consider on top of KTLO items and break-fixs keep the team very busy. 

Hope this helps, happy to offer clarity or answer any questions along the way

[Ben Pierce]

I would focus on governance and a scalable operating model for the platform.  This will help you create the technical governance standards that are needed when you are coordinating across your team and multiple other partners who are developing.  It will help you create the strategic and demand governance and processes needed to manage the inflow of requests for enhancements and new functionality implementations.  Finally I would consider bumping maturing your CMDB up to the top of the list.  Good CMDB data will serve you in so many different ways.  Connected to this is ensuring you are staying aligned to the CSDM.  All the best!