How best to support and accelerate the evolution of IT at your enterprise?
This is not (simply) a philosophical or rhetorical question. It's one you need to answer correctly to maximize your enterprise's agility and performance, as well as the value of its investments in IT.
A first step in coming up with an answer is to look at exactly how IT is evolving. Based on input and feedback from IT leaders wrestling with this very question, Figure 1 shows a view of that evolution's trajectory.
Figure 1: The evolution of service.
As IT expands its focus from help desk functions to IT service management and automation, the range of applications it needs to do its job expands. Ideally, without having to "rip and replace" any elements of the foundation upon which those applications reside and rely.
Precisely the criteria that inspired the original design and drive the continuing evolution of the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform.
When ServiceNow founder and chief product officer Fred Luddy created the software that would become ServiceNow, he set out to create a forms-based workflow system in the cloud. Or as Fred himself put it, "When I started ServiceNow, my vision was to build a cloud-based platform that would enable regular people to create meaningful applications to route work through an enterprise." He then built a set of applications atop that platform, applications designed to support IT service desk processes based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines.
That set of applications has evolved into the ServiceNow Service Automation Suite, and that suite runs atop the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform.
Figure 2: The ServiceNow Service Automation Suite and Service Automation Platform.
As Figure 2 shows, the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform delivers multiple features to every application that runs on it. And all of those features are essential contributors to the evolution of IT at nearly 2,000 enterprises around the world.
Social IT enables chat and threaded, Facebook-like conversations from within the applications about which users want and need to collaborate.
Reporting translates application-generated data into consolidated, actionable information.
Survey management lets IT find out what users think, like, and don't like, information that helps adoption and reduces frustration as IT services evolve.
The integrated content management system enables IT to control the "look and feel" of applications and services, increasing user adoption and satisfaction.
Knowledge Management & Managed Documents provide consolidated management of and access to user-contributed knowledge base articles, critical business documents, and other information that aids user self-service and IT governance, risk, and compliance (GRC).
Service Level Management helps to ensure that IT and its suppliers are delivering promised service levels.
Graphical workflow features ease and speed capture, automation, reliable repeatability, and sharing of critical processes, within and beyond IT.
Mobility enablement features make every application accessible and usable on any Apple or Android smartphone or tablet, with displays automatically optimized for each device type.
And perhaps most important to progressing further along IT's evolutionary trajectory, all of these features are available to any application running on the ServiceNow platform. Any application, whether built by ServiceNow, ServiceNow partners, or ServiceNow customers themselves. Including custom business applications, delivery of which is how IT can extend its successes at service management and automation to other shared enterprise services. Management of human resources (HR), facilities, or finance, for three examples.
Which is why the ServiceNow platform also includes an App Creator and support for team development of custom applications. These tools make it easy and fast for "citizen developers" to build great custom applications that take full advantage of the power of the ServiceNow platform.
All of the features of the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform and the applications it supports are themselves supported by ServiceNow's "enterprise IT cloud" infrastructure, as shown in Figure 3. The combined strengths of the platform and that infrastructure deliver the advantages of native cloud solutions at availability, reliability and security levels that exceed those of many premise-based alternatives.
Figure 3: The ServiceNow Service Automation Platform and "enterprise IT cloud" infrastructure.
The ServiceNow Service Automation Platform powers applications that consolidate, automate, and consumerize IT service management and automation, and enables business users to create and deploy modern, capable custom business applications. This combined continuum of features enables IT leaders and their teams to transform IT and then their enterprises, all atop the same robust, reliable and secure cloud-based platform. And that firm, flexible foundation is enabling a growing number of enterprises to begin and accelerate IT transformation and progress towards service relationship management across the entire organization.
Check out the customer success stories and the Custom Application Showcase at the ServiceNow Web site. Ditto some of the on-demand ServiceNow Webinars featuring enterprises that have already begun their transformational journeys. Register for and attend Knowledge14 and talk to IT leaders from some of those enterprises face-to-face. Then, get the journey started or accelerated at your enterprise.
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