Welcome to our Community Week MVP Insights series! Join ServiceNow MVP Victor Leite as he dives into lessons of Value Realization in Practice with ServiceNow.
Digital projects often start with energy and speed. Integrations, automations, dashboards, and AI arrive quickly. The impulse is understandable. Without clarity on the intended strategic impact, however, an initiative easily becomes just another delivery. Many organizations still begin without structured mechanisms to assess, prioritize, and track value across the lifecycle. That is the critical gap that disciplined Value Realization closes by connecting technology to measurable results.
Two stories with the same objective: elevate customer service
In the first scenario the team jumped straight to solutioning. A broad set of automations and legacy integrations was implemented, plus monitoring layers and sophisticated reporting. Operational gains appeared. Average handle time dropped and agent productivity increased. Months later the organizational impact remained modest. With no explicit outcomes, baselines, or benefit governance, success stayed confined to how we delivered rather than why it mattered.
In the second scenario we started with Value Realization. Before architecture, we agreed on business outcomes: contact deflection, recurrence reduction, and improvements in NPS and MTTR. We established baselines, identified the most material pain points, and quantified expected benefits. The decision was to focus on intelligent triage with AI and knowledge-driven self-service, integrated into workflow. The technical effort was smaller, yet the impact was larger. Contact volume fell materially, the customer experience improved, and the service function gained a strategic role in the business. The difference was outcome-led prioritization, active benefit governance, and formal proof of value after go-live.
How to get there with Value Realization
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Structured diagnosis
Map pains, digital maturity, change readiness, and business objectives by area and persona. This prevents “a solution in search of a problem” and directs automation and AI to where they truly move the needle.
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Value quantification
Treat return as a portfolio of metrics. Combine financial indicators like ROI, payback, and TCO with operational measures such as productivity, lead time, and quality, plus experiential metrics like NPS and CSAT, and strategic dimensions like risk and compliance. Baselines are mandatory, with explicit assumptions for sensitivity analysis.
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Criteria-based prioritization
Use a scorecard that weighs business impact, implementation effort, risk, organizational readiness, and strategic alignment. Visualizing impact versus effort supports clear choices under resource constraints.
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Benefit governance
Define accountable roles for executive sponsorship, value ownership, product decisions, and data stewardship. Establish recurring reviews that connect strategic objectives to operational KPIs, with tolerances and course-correction plans.
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Proof of value
Register benefits, targets, assumptions, and owners. Close only when objective criteria are met, indicators are stable, and there is formal acceptance of realized value. Capture lessons learned to scale what worked.
This end-to-end discipline yields better decisions and more assertive roadmaps. Across many engagements, consistent patterns emerged when diagnosis, quantification, prioritization, governance, and proof moved together: shorter time to build credible business cases, higher confidence in investment choices, and measurable realization after release.
Why ServiceNow is the right ground
The platform unifies workflow, data, AI, and end-to-end orchestration. ITSM, CSM, ITOM, SPM, FSM, Now Assist, and AI Agent expand the solution space. Value does not arise from feature accumulation. It emerges when each capability is applied to the specific problem with clear outcomes, active governance, and continuous measurement. That is our commitment in advisory work: translate business need into initiatives prioritized by value, sustained by data, and monitored until benefits materialize.
From delivery to impact
When teams ask “which organizational outcome must we change” before “which solution should we build,” the tone of the conversation and the investment pattern both improve. The organization leaves the delivery treadmill and enters a cycle of realized value. In a platform as rich as ServiceNow, this discipline reduces waste, accelerates benefit capture, and strengthens the partnership between business and IT. In the end, digital transformation is not about what we implement. It is about what the organization becomes after implementation.
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