If you're a ServiceNow platform owner inside a utility, there likely exists a common tension: your executive team is investing in the platform expecting transformation, but the conversations at the top are about service reliability, workforce attrition, regulatory compliance and security, and customer affordability, not ServiceNow workflows. The gap between what your platform can do and what your C-suite is measured on is where value gets lost.
That gap is exactly what Impact is designed to close. Not as a support channel, but as a structured framework for tying platform adoption to the outcomes your COO, CHRO, and CISO are reporting against.
Below are three plays where utilities can maximise value from their ServiceNow platform with Impact, and how to build the executive narrative around each example.
1. From ITOM Configuration to Reliability Metrics the Board Actually Tracks
Reliability is no longer a background assumption in utilities, it's the organising principle. From Black Summer to the 2022 east coast floods, to Cyclone Alfred hitting Brisbane in 2025, extreme events are testing grid resilience with increasing frequency, and regulators are judging utilities first on whether the lights stay on. At the same time, coal is exiting the NEM faster than replacement capacity is coming online, and electricity demand is forecast to jump significantly on the back of data centres, EVs, and industrial electrification. The margin for error is compressing, and that applies to IT and OT systems just as much as the physical infrastructure.
Utility executives are measured on reliability indices: SAIDI, SAIFI, CAIDI, and in Australia, these are tied directly to financial incentives and penalties through the AER's STPIS scheme. They're not abstract KPIs; they're what boards use to judge whether capital investment is translating into better service. For water utilities, the pressure looks different but it's just as real: non-revenue water targets, main break rates, and service interruptions, all benchmarked by the BoM and increasingly tied to state pricing determinations.
Here's what many platform owners miss: your ITOM deployment directly influences these numbers, but you may not be framing it that way. Incomplete discovery means blind spots in your service maps. Poorly correlated Event Management means your operations centre drowns in noise and MTTR blows out. Inaccurate CMDB data means failed changes, which create the very outages regulators are measuring.
The Impact play:
Request the TuneUp Your ITOM Discovery accelerator through your Impact workspace. This is a fixed-scope engagement , available to Impact customers at no additional cost, where ServiceNow experts use HealthScan to assess your current ITOM Discovery implementation, identify the top three problem areas, and give you a prioritised set of recommended actions with leading practices.
Pair it with the Jumpstart Your CMDB accelerator, which provides a 90-minute coaching session covering the CMDB workspace, Identification and Reconciliation Engine, Data Manager, and health dashboards, helping you build a strategy for CMDB accuracy that underpins everything from event correlation to change risk assessment.
Note that Impact Guided customers can run one accelerator at a time. By comparison, Impact Total customers can run two accelerators at a time per catalogue, with a maximum concurrency of six
The executive story:
Once the accelerators are complete, try keeping track of some Outcomes Insights report for ITOM. It can benchmark metrics like MTTR and incident volume against sector peers, with trend data over time (monthly or quarterly) so you can show improvement trajectory. This is your bridge to the boardroom. When your COO asks whether the platform investment is contributing to improved SAIDI/SAIFI performance, you have a data-backed answer ready to go.
Frame it as: "Our platform is reducing the IT-side contributors to service interruptions, and here's the trend data to prove it."
Where to start:
Open your Impact workspace and request the TuneUp Your ITOM Discovery accelerator (even if Discovery is already deployed), and the Jumpstart Your CMDB accelerator. The resulting HealthScan will almost certainly surface configuration gaps you didn't know were there. Then, begin tracking the Outcomes Insights that are most relevant to you, and map it to the data point you are trying to measure. If your utility reports SAIDI/SAIFI or equivalent metrics quarterly, align your Outcomes Insight reviews to the same cycle.
2. Turn HRSD into a Workforce Risk Mitigation Strategy
The workforce crisis in utilities isn't news to anyone privy to the space, but it sure is accelerating. The sector's workforce is aging fast, with a significant share approaching retirement just as the industry faces its most complex transformation in a generation. Nearly half of all trade occupations remain in shortage nationally, and utilities investment has more than doubled to $36 billion, yet the workforce to deliver and maintain that infrastructure is stretched thin. On top of that, the skills the sector needs next (data analytics, cybersecurity, digital operations) aren't the skills most of the current workforce has.
For utility executives this presents an operational risk, alongside a bad HR headache. Every experienced technician or compliance specialist who retires takes institutional knowledge that was never documented. Every new hire who takes six months to become productive is a period of elevated risk. And every manual HR process; like leave requests over email, safety compliance checks on spreadsheets, onboarding via shared drives, is a drag on a workforce you can't afford to lose hours from.
This is where HRSD on ServiceNow could be doing more for you; much more than just a ticketing system for HR cases. The real value: onboarding automation, knowledge capture, self-service for field workers, is often sitting there under-utilised.
The Impact play:
Pull up the Product Adoption Roadmap (PAR) feature in your Impact workspace. You can create a PAR from a template use-case, or create a roadmap completely bespoke to your project goals (like full HRSD realisation). The roadmap by default aligns to the crawl → walk → run → fly maturity model, and you can choose and plan for capabilities you're: licensed for but aren't using, currently implementing, or even not currently in use (amongst other options). You don't need to wait for a workshop or an engagement to access it; it's there right now, bolstered from your actual platform entitlements via the Capability Map function within Impact.
It's easy for product adoption to stall somewhere in the crawl-to-walk zone. The platform is technically live, but large parts of the workforce aren't using it, and the features that drive real deflection and efficiency haven't been switched on yet. Virtual Agent for high-volume queries like leave balances and safety certification checks, Knowledge Management for capturing institutional knowledge before it retires with the workforce, or Enterprise Onboarding to compress time-to-productivity for new hires. The PAR helps you understand where you are on your implementation journey, so when your CHRO or COO asks whether the platform investment is reducing workforce risk, you're not saying "HRSD is live." You're showing maturity trajectory and project planning with data behind it.
Example PAR view. Yours will reflect your actual entitlements and input.
The executive story:
Position the PAR as a referenceable artefact and source-of-truth which you can put in front of your executive leadership, to show workflow implementation, progress, and planning . It gives your CHRO and COO (amongst others) a visual, phased view of what HRSD (for example) can do for the business long-term, mapped against where you are today. eg. Employee Center, Virtual Agent, Enterprise Onboarding, Knowledge Management, tied directly to the workforce challenges they're already talking about: the retirement cliff, time-to-productivity for new hires, knowledge loss, and field worker self-service.
From a change management perspective, this is how you make the platform roadmap palatable. Executives often don't want a big-bang rollout; they want to see a sequenced plan that shows what's being activated next, why it matters, and what it'll measurably improve. The crawl → walk → run → fly framing gives them exactly that: a progression they can endorse, fund, and track without needing to understand the platform's technical detail.
You can customise the naming of each PAR directly to the workforce challenges they're probably already talking about, like: Enterprise Onboarding and Knowledge Management to close the gap on time-to-productivity and knowledge loss as experienced workers retire, Virtual Agent to give field crews self-service without calling a help desk, and Employee Centre for example.
Where to start:
Create one; it's a compelling single-slide visual you can bring to an executive conversation, or keep as a north-star to reference for your team, showing the gap between what you have deployed, and what is planned.
Tip: Works best when complete your Capability Map, having the maturity and status of all your applications and use-cases already defined
3. Use Platform Security as a Compliance Asset, Not Just a Hygiene Task
For utilities in Australia, you're operating critical infrastructure, and the regulatory environment has tightened fast. The SOCI Act now covers eleven sectors, with energy, water, and transport front and centre. Operators are required to maintain a board-approved risk management program (CIRMP), submit annual reports, and comply with designated cybersecurity frameworks. The 2024 amendments went further, expanding scope to data storage systems, broadening government intervention powers, and giving regulators the ability to direct entities to fix seriously deficient programs. Ransomware payment reporting is now mandatory, with IoT security standards staged through 2026.
The threat environment matches the regulatory urgency. The ASD reported that over 11% of the cyber incidents it responded to in 2023–24 were in critical infrastructure, and ASIO has publicly warned about foreign intelligence agencies targeting Australian utilities. For a sector where IT and OT are increasingly converging: SCADA, smart meters, connected field devices; the attack surface is expanding at exactly the moment the regulatory bar is rising.
For platform owners, this creates a clear opportunity: your ServiceNow instance is a security asset, not just an operational tool. But only if it's hardened properly... Many utilities haven't reviewed their platform security configuration since initial deployment, and default settings rarely align with best practice.
The Impact play:
Request the TuneUp Your Security accelerator through your Impact workspace. This is available to Impact customers at no additional cost. ServiceNow SMEs will clone your instance, run HealthScan against your security configuration, and deliver a coaching session covering the Security Centre, security best practices, and recommended configuration changes.
They'll apply the recommended hardening changes to the temporary instance so you can see the before-and-after impact, and then hand over the full set of suggested changes for your team to implement in production. You also get 30 days of follow-up support for questions.
Once you've completed the TuneUp, make sure you've enabled your monthly Health Scorecard reports in the Impact workspace to maintain visibility over time. The Health Scorecard breaks down your instance health into four categories: manageability, performance, security, and upgradability, with findings ranked by urgency (act, recommend, discuss). The security component gives you a recurring, quantified view of your platform's security posture that tracks whether gaps are being closed month to month. Think of TuneUp as the deep-dive intervention, and the Health Scorecard as the ongoing rhythm that keeps you honest after the work is done.
The executive story:
This is one of the easiest sections to present to leadership because the regulatory driver does the heavy lifting for you. Your board is already required to approve the CIRMP annually and is accountable for cyber risk under SOCI. Walk in with your monthly Health Scorecard trending alongside your TuneUp remediation plan, and you're showing them two things: the current security posture of a system that underpins critical operations, and a concrete trajectory toward closing gaps.
Frame it as: "Here's our ServiceNow platform security baseline, here's what we've hardened, and here's our month-on-month trajectory toward full alignment with our CIRMP obligations."
That's a conversation your CISO, CIO, and board risk committee will engage with immediately.
Where to start:
Pull up your Health Scorecard in Impact and get familiar with the interface. Ensure the monthly scan schedule is active, so it starts building a trend. Use that first report to build the case for requesting the TuneUp Your Security accelerator, then present both to your CISO as a paired diagnostic-and-remediation plan: TuneUp to fix what needs fixing, Health Scorecard to prove it's staying fixed.
In a regulatory environment where boards are personally accountable for critical infrastructure risk, a platform owner who can show proactive security hardening with data behind it is speaking the language that matters.
The Common Thread
Across all three of these plays, the platform owner's job remains the same: translate what's happening on the ServiceNow platform into the language your executive team already speaks. Reliability indices. Workforce risk metrics. Security posture and regulatory compliance evidence.
Impact gives you the framework to do this: accelerators (included in your entitlement at no additional cost) to close configuration and security gaps, Outcomes Insights to benchmark and trend your performance, Product Adoption Roadmaps to sequence capability maturity, Health Scorecards to track platform health and security, and your CSM to help tie it all together.
The utilities getting the most from their ServiceNow investment aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest platform teams. They're the ones using Impact to build a structured, evidence-based story that connects platform adoption to the outcomes their C-suite is being measured against.
Pick the one closest to a conversation your executive team is already having, and reach out to your Impact CSM for help.
And, if you're already running these plays, I'd love to hear what's working and what's not!
Drop a comment below 👇
